India records among the highest number of road crash fatalities in the world, and speeding remains a leading cause, year after year. As courts increasingly link road fatalities to the right to life under Article 21, the conversation is shifting from blaming individual road users to designing safe systems that manage speed and protect lives.

In conversation with Rinki Sharma, Lead – Projects at Consumer VOICE and part of the Road Safety Network, Ashim Sanyal, Managing Trustee of Consumer VOICE and a long-standing voice within the Road Safety Network on road safety, unpacks what evidence-based speed management really means, the misconceptions that hold progress back, and what India can learn from global best practices as it works toward safer, more liveable streets.

Mobility often gets pitted against safety in public discussions. How should city planners think about balancing the two?
I think the first shift city planners need to make is to stop seeing speed limits as something that slows a city down. If you design roads around the Safe System approach — where speed is matched to how a road is actually used, and protects the most vulnerable person on it, not the fastest vehicle — mobility and safety stop competing. In school zones, markets, or busy mixed-use streets, you need lower limits and calmer design; on highways with no pedestrians around, higher speeds make sense. Honestly, engineering and enforcement need to work hand in hand — narrower lanes, raised crossings, and better junctions naturally slow people down, and consistent enforcement makes sure those changes actually hold on the ground. And mobility itself needs a rethink: a steady 40 km/h with no crashes usually gets people there faster than a 60 km/h road full of jams and crashes. Add to this the constitutional angle, the right to life under Article 21, and it becomes clear that protecting
commuters isn’t at odds with keeping a city moving. It’s actually the same goal.

When we talk about scientific speed management, what does that actually mean on the ground?
Put simply, it means limits are set using evidence, not guesswork or convenience. Before deciding a number, you’d look at road safety audits, traffic studies, crash data, how the road is really being used, by whom, and how often things go wrong there. It also means the limit should match what the road actually is: a highway built for through-traffic shouldn’t be treated the same as a crowded urban street, even if both are technically “roads.” And it’s never a one-time decision; traffic patterns and land use shift, so limits need revisiting. What makes it “scientific” rather than arbitrary is the transparency of the method: speed surveys, crash mapping, and engineering judgment, so people can see why a number was chosen instead of feeling it was picked out of thin air. That credibility is what actually gets people to follow the rule.

There seem to be quite a few myths around speed and mobility. What are the ones you’d want to correct first?
The biggest one is assuming higher limits mean faster travel. In practice, roads with high limits but constant crashes and stop-start traffic often move more slowly overall than a well-managed road with a lower, steady speed. People also tend to think speed limits are mainly about restricting cars, but it’s really pedestrians and cyclists who pay the price — someone hit at 50 km/h has far less chance of surviving than someone hit at 30 km/h, and that gap gets lost in discussions focused only
on traffic flow. There’s also a tendency to blame the driver alone, when road design is often the real culprit; a wide, straight road with no visual cues will tempt people to speed, no matter what the sign says. And many assume safety measures hurt the economy, but the cost of crashes, medical bills, lost workdays, and insurance claims usually outweighs whatever time was saved. Limits also aren’t meant to be permanent; they need to evolve as cities do.

Looking beyond India, what global practices do you think we should be paying closer attention to?
A few stand out. Sweden’s Vision Zero starts from the idea that every road fatality is preventable, and builds infrastructure assuming people will make mistakes, so the responsibility shifts from blaming drivers to fixing the road itself. The Netherlands takes this further with roads designed to be self-explanatory, where the layout itself tells you how fast to go, instead of relying on drivers to notice a sign. For India specifically, adopting scientific, data-backed speed-setting is probably the most urgent lesson, using real crash and traffic data instead of politically convenient numbers. Cities like Bogotá and Fortaleza show you don’t need a huge budget either; speed humps and pedestrian- priority zones have cut fatalities significantly even in resource-constrained settings. But maybe the deeper lesson is about framing: countries that succeeded treated road safety as a public health and rights issue, not just a traffic rule, and India’s courts are already moving that way. The job now is
turning that into consistent practice on the ground.

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Ashim Sanyal is Managing Trustee at Consumer VOICE and a long-standing voice within the Road Safety Network.
Rinki Sharma leads projects at Consumer VOICE and has spent over a decade working on road safety as part of the Road Safety Network.