Speeding and driving

Slow down!

Spend more time in the safety of your family. Don’t exceed 90/100 km per hour, not even where it is allowed and in the best climatic and road conditions.

Slow down 10 km per hour your usual speed will increase your safety noticeably.

Keep the distance or safety space. To prevent an accident caused by another driver’s mistake or by an unexpected event in the road or with your vehicle, you need more time to manoeuvre. Keeping a safe space ahead, behind and at the sides of the vehicle will give you this possibility. The more the distance is, the more time you have to manoeuvre.

Adjust the speed

Speeding is one of the main causes of death in routes and roads.

Take into account that the faster you drive, the more is the time and the distance that you need to stop the car and the more serious the consequences in case of mechanical failure –such as a flat tyre, another driver’s wrong manoeuvre or another unexpected event- will be. Maximum speed allowed by traffic signals or regulation is not always the safest one. Safe speed, that the Law calls “precautionary speed”, is the speed that “allows the driver to have the total control of his vehicle all the time and not to hinder circulation”.

In some circumstances, it is necessary to slow down. Take into account that:

• As your speed increases, your risk of dying also increases since there is less time to act and more distance is needed to brake.
• From 80 km per hour, the risk of dying in a traffic accident is doubled every 15 km/h.

That is why it is very important to respect speed limits, although they don’t seem appropriate, because there are always reasons for them which are related to safety. There could be complicated situations in the road that you have never lived before but that justify a certain speed limit.

Besides, your speed must be adjusted to:

• The quantity and speed of other vehicles which are circulating around you. This rule is valid to drive respecting the allowed and safe speed, never with a speed higher than the allowed and safe one. For example: If you speed up more than the allowed amount because an anxious subject latches on to you and harasses you with his/her lights... there will be two anxious subjects behind the steering wheel instead of one!. If they hurry you, move your car and let them overtake you: don’t pay attention to them!. Another example: it is very common to see, in a very congested road, some hurried and anxious people that zigzag or circulate along the road shoulder, crazy for advancing faster. This is not safe neither for them nor for the rest of the people.
• Road conditions. The conditions of the road oblige to slow down in some circumstances. For example, if surface is a gravel road, if the road is narrow, with curves, with pronounced inclines, without road shoulders, not well marked, and so on.
• Time and climatic conditions: At night, when it is raining, when it is foggy, when there is dust or snow, etc, to slow down increases the  possibility of manoeuvring.