Majority of public back Autobahn speed limit (per YouGov poll)

TheLocal.de ^ | 15 Oct 2015 12:40 GMT+02:00 | Tom Barfield

[Olog-hai]

A new survey published on Thursday shows that a majority of Germans are in favor of speed limits on the Autobahn—the country’s highways, which until now have been famously limit-free.

The number of countries with no nationwide speed limit on highways is vanishingly small. Other members of the club besides Germany include Afghanistan, North Korea, and the Isle of Man, a British dependency in the Irish sea.

Now pollsters from YouGov have found that 56 percent of the public would be in favor of a nationwide speed limit of 150 km/h on Germany’s 12,950 kilometers of motorway—but that lower limits were still out of the question.

Just 40 percent would support a limit of 130 km/h—the same as France—while a tiny 11 percent would be OK with national limits of 100 km/h, just under the British national limit of 70 mph (112 km/h).

Across the Autobahn network, many stretches already have a speed limit—and there’s a “suggested” speed of 130 km/h across the network. …

[oldsicilian]

That is a very big problem. Plus the fact that Germany is in the middle of Europe and gets a lot of traffic from Eastern countries where driver education isn't so great.