New Delhi: With 1,578 fatal crashes recorded in 2025, the city’s roads are once again under the spotlight for a familiar reason: speed. While that’s a little up from 1,504 such crashes in 2024, the city continues to operate under a confusing patchwork of speed limits — 50kmph on some roads, 60kmph on others and far higher on highways slicing through dense urban areas. This mismatch between design and danger took centre stage at a recent seminar held by Road Safety Network (RSN) in collaboration with IIT Delhi and IIT Kharagpur, where experts called for a uniform 50kmph cap on urban roads with even stricter limits in residential areas, school zones and pedestrian-heavy corridors.The seminar brought together road safety researchers, policymakers, enforcement officials, urban planners and civil society groups who debated on maximum speed limits on national highways and city roads.Highlighting the national picture, Bhargab Maitra, professor of civil engineering at IIT Kharagpur and a member of RSN, pointed to the outsized role of highways in fatal crashes. “While national highways form just 2% of India’s road network, they account for over 36% of road fatalities. Speeding is the biggest risk factor, especially for vulnerable road users,” he said, stressing that lower speed limits must be paired with stronger enforcement, public awareness and quicker emergency response.In the first session, which focused on national highways, speakers noted that high speeds clashed with Indian road conditions — mixed traffic, frequent access points, roadside settlements and minimal protection for pedestrians and two-wheelers. Treating highways as uninterrupted high-speed corridors becomes especially hazardous, they warned, when they pass through towns or urban fringes.David Cliff, CEO of Global Road Safety Partnership, Geneva, underlined that even modest reductions in speed could sharply reduce fatalities and serious injuries. Drawing on global best practices, he recommended 30kmph in cities, under 80kmph on rural roads and 100kmph on expressways, supported by strict and consistent enforcement.Urban roads also came under scrutiny. Contrary to popular belief, experts said most fatal crashes in cities didn’t occur in narrow lanes but on wide arterial roads, flyovers and signal-free corridors, often during low-traffic hours when drivers were tempted to speed. The data is stark: speeding accounted for 68.1% of all road fatalities in India in 2023 and 72.5% of deaths were on national highways. Even a 1kmph increase in average speed raises the risk of injury crashes by 3% and fatal crashes by up to 5%.Participants rejected the notion that lower speed limits would significantly worsen commute times. In already congested cities, they argued, speed caps have little impact on travel duration but can dramatically cut fatalities, while also improving air quality, public health and neighbourhood liveability.Traffic enforcement, experts acknowledged, faces structural limits — manpower shortages, unpaid challans and diminishing deterrence. While speed cameras and technology help, they cannot compensate for unsafe road design. Instead, roads must become “self-explaining”, using lane narrowing, traffic calming and safer junction design to naturally slow down drivers.A three-tier urban speed framework received broad support: 30km/hour for neighbourhoods and school zones, 40km/hour for mixed-use corridors and 50km/hour for limited-access arterials with pedestrian segregation. Frequent speed changes, experts warned, only breed confusion and non-compliance.Participants favoured area-wise speed limits, reclassification of urban highway stretches passing through dense settlements and institutional responsibility for setting and reviewing limits. Speed management, they said, must be integrated with public health, air quality and noise policies, backed by better crash data, capacity-building and public engagement.“In India, there is often a gap between road design, speed limit implementation and public compliance,” said prof Geetam Tiwari of IIT Delhi’s TRIPP Centre. “Global evidence is clear that 50kmph is the absolute maximum safe speed in urban areas.”
