British driver caught speeding in France after misreading km/h for mph

A British driver in France has been stripped of his driver licence after misreading a 125 km/h speed limit sign for 125 mph. This is not the first time that miles and kilometres have been confused when reading speed limits. Back in January 2021, Metric Views reported a similar case of a high-profile foreign Premier League footballer who confused km/h and mph when driving in the UK. And it is unlikely to be the last time it happens.

The driver was arrested by the French police after driving 202 km/h, equivalent to 125 mph, on a road with a 125 km/h speed limit. This is 77 km/h over the speed limit. He was stopped when driving a Range Rover on the A26 motorway last week passing through the Aisne region in the north of France. The police were unconvinced by his explanation that he got confused over measurement units, so they took his driving licence away and fined him. He will also have to appear in court for the speeding offence. The consequences of driving over one and a half times the legal speed limit could have been fatal.

The RAC says: “France uses the metric system for all road signs, meaning speed limits and other road signs including distance are indicated using kilometres and metres.” Such a warning would be unnecessary if the UK used metres and kilometres on its roads like the rest of Europe. Within the whole of Europe, mph speed limits are only used in the UK and in the British crown dependencies in the British Isles. The rest of Europe uses km/h speed limits.

This case and the Mesut Özil case have been reported. How many more cases like these have not been reported? How many times have drivers confused km/h and mph? Confusion would be avoided if the British used the same measurement units on their roads as all other European countries. Mistakes like this and the potentially serious accidents they could cause can be avoided if the UK changed the units on British traffic signs to metres and kilometres.

Sources

14 thoughts on “British driver caught speeding in France after misreading km/h for mph”

  1. I’m sure that a lot of British drivers caught speeding use the defence of reading km/h as mph, but it is not a defence at all. Unless he or she is quite old, a British driver will have learnt metric units at school and anyone travelling to France or elsewhere in Europe can be expected to know that the speeds and distances are shown in metric units. Plus, if a driver really did think they are allowed to travel at over 200 km/h, or 125 mph, in France, they should indeed have their licence confiscated and sent back to the issuing authority in their home country. It will be interesting to hear how the police deal with this.

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  3. miklcct wrote: Do French signs have the label km/h like in Ireland?

    Why would they need to? France doesn’t operate different systems of measurement for different purposes. Everyone learns metric at school and knows that road signs show metric units. Ireland included ‘km/h’ on its new, metric signs in 2004 as it had changed to metric from the imperial inherited from when it was part of the UK. So just to make it absolutely clear that the signs were in metric units. I imagine that label will eventually be dropped.

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  5. @miklcct: No – Ireland is one of the few countries that actually puts “km/h” on its road signs and is is only because otherwise there would be no difference between the mph speed limit signs that they have before 2004 and the km/h speed limit signs currently in use. The underlying reason for this is that Ireland followed the UK in its design of speed limit signs. The Worboys Committee which made recommendations for the overhaul of UK road signs in 1963 did so a year of two before metrication was announced, so their report did not account for metrication. In the 1970s when metrication of British speed limits was imminent, I believe that the proposal was to have a speed limit sign with a diagonal red line through its middle and to have the mph speed limit in the upper left half and the km/h speed limit in the lower right half (at any rate that is what I saw in Mauritius in 1978).

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  6. Whilst I fully agree that the UK should use metric units in full (I would not be here if i didnt) that is not a defence. If nothing else when you see a sign that says 120, its a pretty clear indicator its in km/h. If you dont know French signs are in KM then you really should not be driving in France. To me its as stupid a defence as driving on the left over there and claiming you “didn’t know”

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  7. There is no way the driver mistook the sign to mean a speed limit in mph. Driving over 200 km/h when everyone else on the road is doing 125 km/h should have clued the driver in that he was going too fast. If he really wanted to experience driving over 200 km/h, then he should have gone to Germany and found a section of the autobahn that still allows for an unlimited speed.

    He must have thought the French to be fools that they would believe his lame excuse. Good that they didn’t. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the speed limits on roadways are pretty much the same everywhere, no matter what numbers are posted.

    I wonder if his car had a switchable speedometer that could have been changed once in France. But even with these, when people have these on their vehicles, they almost never change them when going to a country that uses a different set of units then they use in their home country, keeping the units they are accustom to.

    It would be nice, but incidences like this will never convince metric opposers in the government to see the need to harmonise English road signs with those of the rest of the world.

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  8. Having returned from France in the last 24 hours this story really hit home. I’ve driven in Europe twice in the last few months, one on a motorbike and once in a car (the latter I have been doing for many decades, the former opened my eyes).

    The first factor in play is speedometers. While it may be true that ‘most’ modern vehicles have dual unit displays, the analogue speedometer is fast being replaced with a digital only or TFT display which will only show one unit at a time which means that under normal circumstances British drivers are now not acclimtised to seeing km/h alongside MPH. Worse still, the instructions for switching from one to the other are not always obvious in owners manuals with the result that some drivers, particularly those of used vehicles where the manuals may have been lost, don’t appear to be aware that it’s possible to do so, let alone know how it’s done.

    Travelling by motorbike you do tend to communicate more with your fellow travellers and I was both shocked and horrified by the small number of riders who didn’t realise you could change to metric but more so by the larger number who didn’t believe it was necessary to do so!

    Going on to the road signs themselves… 125 km/h? I can’t say I’ve ever seen this as a speed limit so can only guess it was a press conversion. I seem to recall that there are signs around Eurotunnel reminding drivers that it’s km/h and there are even signs in some places on the Autoroutes reminding drivers of the speed limits. The wording is in French but the signs clearly say ‘130 km/h’ and ‘110 km/h’ (the latter being the speed limit in rain which seems to be largely ignored by the locals too). But I can’t imagine ang British driver would honestly believe the signs were in MPH because you would be going significantly faster than almost all other traffic on the roads!

    In my view it’s more arrogant pig headedness than honest ignorance that is the real issue when British drivers drive outside the UK.

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  9. The press articles claim the driver misread the signs, not that he misread a 125 km/h sign for mph. I travel quite a lot in France and I must say I have never seen a 125 km/h sign. If I am correct the highest speed signs are 110 km/h and then 130 km/h, which are found on the motorways. If we take the driver at his word, perhaps he did see a 130 km/h sign on the motorway, the maximum authorised speed, and thought if he kept to 125 (mph) he will be under 130! It beggars belief that a British tourist would think you can drive on a French motorway at nearly twice the British motorway speed limit.

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  10. A few years ago I was driving away from the Eurotunnel terminal in Kent, having spent an afternoon in France. We came to some road works, where temporary speed restrictions were in place. I slowed down to the indicated speed limit. Along the restricted stretch, in my mirror a saw a car with French registration approaching me at high speed and braking at the last minute to avoid hitting me.

    I expect that visitors from France may be briefed with km/h equivalents to our speed limits for standard roads like motorways, built-up areas, etc. But they cannot be briefed on temporary speed limits posted in mph. Their speedometers show km/h only. How on earth can the DFT continue to claim that there is no safety issue here?

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  11. I recently read about an Australian woman who, in about 2000, drove from Glasgow to South Wales in an incredibly short time. Her relation in South Wales asked her how she did the journey so quickly and it transpired that the text “km/h” on her speedometer was ambiguously placed. Moreover, having been used to thew wide open spaces in Australia, she was not aware of how fast she was travelling. Fortunately for her, it was her relation who asked the questions, not a police officer.

    I searched Wikimedia Commons for an example and found one at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flickr_-_Nicholas_T_-_Enduring.jpg.  In my view, that speedometer had a very poor design – the text “km/h” and “MPH” should be sited such that they can both been seen at the same time.

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  12. Another area that is often overlooked in respect of metrication is tyre pressure.  The recommended pressures in my car are stated in bars, but when I go to the service station, I have to manually select bars rather than retaining the default psi. If someone from the Continent is not aware of this anomaly, they could well end up with under-inflated tyres all round. For the record, most Continental countries use kPa for tyre pressure, with a typical pressure being 220 kPa (= 2.2 bars or 32 psi).

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  14. @Daniel: Thank you. My poor editing when I cut and pasted the link.

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