French town discovers that the best way to keep people safe on its roads is by, ironically, raising the speed limit…

• Small French town of Chapelle-sous-Geberoy solves errant speeding problem by raising its speed limit.

• Raising the limit prompted the central French government to act by placing speed cameras, thus improving enforcement.

• Effectively, this French town told people they can go faster, so that, in reality, they would actually go slower.

Chapelle-sous-Geberoy is a small little town that sits just north west of Paris. It reportedly found itself dealing with a familiar problem on its roads – outsiders blasting past its humble speed limit of 30KM/H. This of course led to growing concerns amongst the townsfolk, but they’ve found an unlikely solution.

Though the town enforced its 30KM/H speed limit to an extent, the use of speed cameras in such locations is really a matter of national French policy – a decision that’s not up to said town’s modest council but the bigger central French government instead.

Furthermore, because the town’s main road also doubles up as the main supply route for trucks heading to the nearby wind farm, speed bumps and other such ‘deterrent’ were not viable for safe implementation.

As a result, the 30KM/H speed limit gets frequently broken, causing much frustrated with the situation for the townsfolks. To mitigate this, said folks decided to think outside of the box to find a solution, which was to raise said speed limit to 50KM/H.

Though it sounds counter-intuitive, it’s perhaps a really smart move considering 50KM/H is the minimum speed limit required to prompt the installation of speed cameras by the larger French national government.

This, in turn, brought forth more effective enforcement with the new and raised speed limit of 50KM/H as opposed to older 30KM/H limit, and therefore people are safer too. Ingenious.

If anything, the story of Chapelle-sous-Geberoy shows a few things: big data-driven studies still forget small anomalies as such. More importantly though, the townspeople showed there remain ways to force the people who have forgotten, ignored, and overlooked you to take you into consideration.

In other words, this French town told people they can go faster, so that, in reality, they would actually go slower, thus improving its road safety predicament and mitigate errant speeders. Any chance that we’ll see this sort of out-of-the-box thinking to promote road safety here in Malaysia anytime soon?