narvik

As title suggests: just heard this week that the freeway/motorway speed limit has been raised to allow driving 20% above posted limits without a fine?
So for example: 120 km/h in a posted 100 km/h, and 144 km/h in a posted 120 km/h is now allowed?

Anyone heard about this?
Supposedly came into effect last year, and is nationwide.

tauphi

The minimum band for losing points is 20%-50%. Below 20% you won't lose points, but you may still get a fine. <10% would be a safer threshold if you're trying to avoid a fine but this threshold is not written up in the rules so there is no guarantee (but generally it seems to hold).

mlin32

Aren't speed limits exactly that ? I have never understood such a wide tolerance given the rate of traffic incidents there. I was cringing a little bit when the taxi driver was flying 140 leaving PKX towards the city centre of Pékin.

narvik

(bolding mine)

It's this that has supposedly changed: no more fines within 20% above.
Just can't find any source for it to verify if true or not.

Yeah, some Chinese Taxi drivers have a 'plomb' foot!

tauphi

No speed limits are not to be interpreted literally in East Asia. For example, all motorways in Japan are limited to 80km/s, but the traffic in general travels closer to 120km/s.

YariGuy

In America, reckless driving is usually defined (depending on the state) as 15 or 20 mph over the speed limit. Which doesn't really make sense.

This system of percentages would never work in America. Because math.

moondog

A guy I used to do business with scored a contract to supply and administer photo radar systems around the turn of the century....<editing this now>...it just occurred to me that I shouldn't go into too much detail here even though this story predates the current administration by a decade....the short of it is that they set their citation trigger speeds just barely over the speed limits at first and then gradually bumped them up when confronted with pushback from officials who were getting bundles of tickets themselves, but continued to optimize to their advantage whenever possible. I don't think he or other private citizens elsewhere have been involved in that sort of thing for quite some time (e.g. pretty much a textbook example something the government didn't like), but they certainly helped establish (revenue driven) precedent in traffic law enforcement. I've always had a considerable amount of deference to (speed and red light) cameras, in large part, because I had chance to see how effective they were, even back when the technology was in its nascent stages.

mlin32

Such excess tolerance doesn't make much sense. It becomes a guessing game.

If the maximum height of a car park is 1,9m, trying to enter with a vehicle you know is 2,1m is going to cause problems. There's a reason the sign says 1,9m and not 2,1m.

For comparison's sake, in France, the radars will trigger at +5 km/h over the limit (or 5% if the limit is over 100). In Germany, the tolerance is +3%.

tauphi

I read somewhere that the reason Japan posts such ridiculously low speed limits but allows drivers to exceed them routinely is because there is a legal precedent where the police are not allowed to take action until someone is 40km/h over the speed limit.

Palal

I've yet to drive in Japan, but I don't recall seeing as many cameras there as in China. Now, not all the cameras measure the speed, but still the enforcement can be brutal.

Also, it's very helpful to use Amap or Baidu Maps while driving, even if you know the route, to remind you of average speed zones. I wonder what is the tolerance for that...

In any case, driving in China is really not fun - lots of cameras and people camping out in the left lane require more attention than I would need in, say, Europe