This research does not show what happens in areas outside of rural areas . In cities the speed already is 50 rather than 70 or 90 , so that ' s not under discussion anyway . What they are doing is reducing the default speed of roads outside the builtup zones from 90 to 70 . Also , 0 . 6 % seems insignificant . It ' s significantly different from your claim that it would reduce traffic speeds . I guess we ' ll see on January since we will be the first EU country with such a slow maximum speed on secondary roads . Another first for this country . We already have that speed on most of them in practice very little will change except that a lot of signs on secondary roads will disappear , most roads where 90 is allowed already have signs because it ' s so unusual . At least I hope they ' ll have the common sense to reup the speed limits on secondary roads when the majority of cars are driving automatically . I doubt that will happen . Hold your horses , no automatic car is commercially available yet . When it is , it needs to become affordable , then it has to become standard , and then all the old vehicles have to be replaced which won ' t happen overnight either . So that will take at least a generation . It seems like we ' re in agreement that aggressive drivers are the problem in traffic . Introducing a new law that prevents these drivers from driving at their comfortable speed on roads that are fully capable of handling it will make the problem much worse . Their comfort speed isn ' t a law of nature , it ' s a habit . If anything we should be introducing faster secondary roads where nobody is allowed to build houses . But that ' s not the belgian way . Let ' s build houses absolutely everywhere and turn farm land into rural land . This campaign feels like busywork and covering up the underlying cause of the problem . I completely agree that the lack of spatial planning is the cause of a vast range of traffic and other problems . Sadly , in the current situation , we have to manage the damage .