Facts
Tuesday May 28, 2024 at 12:06 p.m., the Ministry of the Interior published a message on the social network X, viewed three million times, on road safety at work: “If you were going to give your life to this company, that’s nice, but we didn’t ask you anything. »
Beneath these few words was a laconic explanation: “By increasing your speed by 10 km/h over a 30 kilometer journey, you only save 30 seconds. Is it really worth taking the risk? »
The cheking process
We have done the calculation, based on the speeds corresponding to the limits in force. For a 30 km trip, if you drive at 70 km/h, you will cover this distance in 25 minutes and 42 seconds, while at 80 km/h, the trip will last 22 minutes and 30 seconds. That’s a difference of around 3 minutes.
At 90 km/h, you will cover this distance in 20 minutes. On the other hand, if you drive at 100 km/h, the journey will take 18 minutes. The time saved is therefore two minutes.
What if you are on the highway? Driving at 130 km/h, it will take you 13 minutes and 51 seconds to cover 30 km, compared to 12 minutes and 50 seconds at 140 km/h. To save just 30 seconds on such a journey, you would have to drive at around 190 km/h instead of 180 km/h. Which, obviously, would cost you your license.
Even in the case of more choppy traffic, this saving of 30 seconds seems impossible to quantify, because it differs according to each journey.
But where does this figure of 30 seconds saved, put forward by the Ministry of the Interior, come from? It comes from a final evaluation report on the reduction of speed to 80 km/h carried out by the Center for Studies and Expertise on Risks, Environment, Mobility and Development (Cerema ), which dates from 2020, available in full here.
It is written on page 54 that on average, for a journey of 30 km, it took drivers 30 seconds longer after the 80 km/h reform than before, on weekdays, and 40 seconds on weekends. .
The increase in average travel time between August and December 2019, after the implementation of the 80 km/h reform.
© (Photo screenshot Cerema)
To arrive at this conclusion, Cerema based itself on data from Google Maps, on “297 routes with a length of between 25 and 30 kilometers, spread across all the departments of mainland France”from August to December 2019. He compared this data with that recorded from August to December 2017.
However, the report indicates that the average drop in speed observed over this period is of the order of 3.3 km/h.
The drop in real speed after the implementation of the reform is 3.3 km/h on average.
© Capture Cerema
Thus, by driving at 86.7 km/h instead of 90 km/h over a distance of 30 km, the gain is approximately 45 seconds. Which corresponds to the order of magnitude put forward by Cerema.
The verdict: it’s false
When you drive 10 km/h faster than your usual pace, you can save more than thirty seconds on a 30 km journey. But this potential time saving remains marginal and is obviously not worth putting yourself, or others, in danger.
Disinfox
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