The 100 km/h experiment
If a policy lasts shorter than a quarter, it wasn’t a strategy; let’s be honest, it was a knee-jerk reaction.
For three months this year, the drive from Lahore to Islamabad took longer than it used to, and not because of traffic. On March 12, the motorway police cut the speed limit for cars from 120 km/h to 100 km/h, and for buses and heavy vehicles from 110 km/h to 90 km/h, as part of a government austerity push after oil prices spiked when the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran disrupted supply routes. On June 22, without much fanfare, the old limits quietly came back. In between, the country ran a three-month experiment in slower motorways, and it’s worth asking what it actually bought us.
The speed cut also arrived during an unusual period in which schools were closed, universities had moved online and workplaces were operating shortened weeks or with substantial numbers of staff working from home. In my own circle, that flexibility translated into more intercity travel, not less. Whether that pattern showed up in national motorway traffic figures is another question-and precisely the kind of data that would help judge how much fuel the measure actually saved.
The basic case for driving slower is stronger than its critics sometimes admit. Higher average speeds increase both crash risk and the severity of collisions. But traffic safety is also affected by differences in the speeds at which vehicles are travelling. A lower limit works best when motorists broadly comply with it and when communication and enforcement produce a reasonably uniform traffic flow.
On the motorway journeys I made during those weeks, that uniformity was not what I saw. Some cars appeared to be holding close to 100 km/h while others continued travelling at something much closer to the old limit. The result, at least from behind the wheel, was bunching in some lanes and abrupt overtaking in others.
That is why the interesting question is not whether 100 km/h is inherently safer than 120. It is whether the temporary limit actually changed how people drove, and whether accidents or serious injuries fell while it was in force. That observation does not overturn the established safety case for lower speeds. But it does raise the question of compliance.
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We have not been given that comparison.
The second problem was communication. The change was announced through a press handout from the motorway police, and officials said afterward that a public awareness campaign had gone out with it. Whatever that campaign looked like, it doesn’t seem to have reached very many actual drivers.
My own family was among those caught out. We travelled on the motorway during that window, were stopped and fined during the journey and then found out that the speed limit had changed. We were hardly alone: enforcement nevertheless produced more than 48,000 speeding fines by March 24 and more than 58,000 by March 26. That does not prove motorists had not been warned. It does show that non-compliance, or perhaps lack of driver awareness of the limit change, remained substantial enough to produce tens of thousands of penalties within two weeks of the policy taking effect.
Then came Parliament.
That committee meeting is worth pausing on. NHMP’s own inspector general told a parliamentary committee in May that his department was simply enforcing a decision, not the one that made it. In May, a Public Accounts Committee sub-panel asked the government to reconsider the whole thing, with one member proposing the old 120 km/h limit be restored outright. A month later, it was. Which raises the obvious question of what the three months actually achieved.
On paper, the fuel savings were real, if modest: The International Energy Agency estimates that reducing highway speed by 10 km/h can cut an individual driver’s oil use by around five to 10 per cent. But that number assumes the same trip takes less fuel, not that fewer trips happen. The timing worked against the policy here. The cut landed just as Ramadan was ending, right into the country’s single busiest travel window, when everyone who was going to travel home for Eid did so anyway, only at 100 km/h instead of 120. People weren’t driving less. They were driving the same distances, just taking longer to do it.
None of this means fuel conservation is a bad goal, or that speed limits shouldn’t ever change. But a policy that adds real time to people’s journeys and gets reversed within three months after being questioned by the parliamentary committee, isn’t really a fuel policy. It’s closer to a stopgap that outran its own logic. If the next global oil shock brings another version of this back, it might be worth having an honest conversation about the trade-off first, instead of finding out through a challan on your phone.
