The government has finally taken a step forward and I hope that everyone will drive at lower speeds as a matter of course.

If the NPA revised speed limits up to take account of more car safety features and reduced the number of traffic lights then most roads would be safer.

In this rare anomalous accident the doctor clearly was abusing the law by driving at excessive speed.

No, reduce speed limits all over. Reduce the safety features on cars - they are proven to make people more complacent - even make the brakes less good - and take the horns out of them, reduce their size drastically and increase the punishment for accidents that involve injury to third parties. People will be careful then.

I think speed limits and other limits need to be applied sensibly, more sensibly than at present.

40 kph is a common speed limit on dead straight roads with rice fields on either sides and there will be a yellow line down the middle making overtaking illegal. 60 seems high for a residential area in Japan, nearly as high as expressway limits of 80.

Those who drive have probably noticed that the only places where you can legally overtake, places with broken white lines, it would be suicidal to do so.

More intelligence is needed on the application of spped limits, raise some, lower others.

Japanese driving technique also needs some modification. People are taught to drive too close to the kerb and not near the centre line. This is a particularly great danger on roads with no pavement (sidewalk to Americans) as there can be little or now warning when someone exits a sideroad or their drive.

Good initiative. If only they would start building speed bumps and things to ensure that people actually follow the speed limits. In my experience Japanese people are not particularly good at following the rules when driving.

The design of the roads has a huge influence on the speed at which people feel comfortable driving on them. If you have a wide, straight, open road people feel more comfortable driving at high speed than they do on a road with narrower sections, trees at the side and so on. Changing the road design - introducing traffic calming measures is going to be more effective than just reducing speed limits that many people don't follow anyway if they feel they can get away with it.

The design of the roads has a huge influence on the speed at which people feel comfortable driving on them. If you have a wide, straight, open road people feel more comfortable driving at high speed than they do on a road with narrower sections, trees at the side and so on. Changing the road design - introducing traffic calming measures is going to be more effective than just reducing speed limits that many people don't follow anyway if they feel they can get away with it.

Oddly roads in residential areas of Japan sometimes have the opposite effect.

In my neighborhood the main road is an absolute nightmare. Its extremely narrow with no shoulder and too narrow for two cars to pass each other. It is also winding and has buildings constructed right up along the streetside, meaning visibility is extremely limited (can't see past the next bend, which is rarely more than 50 metres away at any given point).

Despite this it is a heavily trafficked, two way street. Cars can only get by each other at certain spots, usually where there is a side street or parking spot where one car can pull over onto to let the oncoming vehicle squeeze by. Its completely chaotic and cars are constantly having to go into reverse to find a spot where they can let ongoing traffic go by (or standoffs occur when neither driver wants to do so).

This is a road that should scream to drivers "Danger! Drive with extreme caution!" but perversely the effects of all of this is to make everyone drive faster on it rather than slower. Drivers are constantly worried about oncoming traffic creating these headaches, so whenever the road ahead of them is clear they just gun it to get down the street (and off of it) as quickly as possible before some other driver appears and screws it up for them.

Not all roads here are like that of course, but in older neighborhoods laid out before the automobile era you do find them and they are just fundamentally not fit for purpose (yet impossible to do anything about since there is no room to improve them).

I wish they could reduce the number of lights. Some are just 10 seconds apart. I used to pick up my son part way home from his junior high school. Along those 2km, I had to navigate through 17 traffic lights. It usually took 15 minutes to drive that far.

Then get the engineers to work on the timing of the lights so the traffic can flow better. Grouping them in 4's or 5's just makes people want to speed up to make a couple extra lights.

 is expected to be reduced from the current 60 kph to 30 kph from September 2026

So we have to wait over two years for this? And then will it actually be enforced?

Maybe if the worthless cops, actually did their job and patrolled the streets once in a while (and not in a group on specific days only), AND THEN actually enforced laws and handed out penalties, maybe there would be some decline in such accidents.

On any given day there are over a dozen horrible drivers out there, yet no one gets penalized.

Unbelievable. When the general consensus is to drive 20kms over the officially designated speed limit, expecting people to slow down is ridiculous.

When I first moved here I drove at the designated speed limit. Within minutes my wife was yelling at me “what are you doing?!” and a line of cars behind me beeping. I quickly learned that designated speed limits here are advisable and not enforced.