Minister tried to ignore procedures to increase speed limit to 130 km/h on all highways

Minister Barry Madlener of Infrastructure tried to circumvent all legal procedures in order to increase the speed limit to 130 kilometers per hour on all Dutch highways. RTL Nieuws discovered this in documents received from the Ministry after an appeal to the Open Government Act.

The documents show that the PVV Minister asked his officials whether he could increase the speed limit on all Dutch highways via a traffic decree - a formal decision by the Minister to take a specific traffic measure. His idea was that people who objected to the higher speed limit would have to start legal procedures, which could take years. In the meantime, the 130 km/h speed limit would apply.

The civil servants explained to Madlener that such a traffic decree could be quickly annulled and would therefore not be a feasible option. The Minister was reluctant to give up on the idea. “He wanted additional explanation about this,” RTL quotes from a summary of the conversation.

The documents also show that Madlener started pushing to increase the speed limit from the moment he took office. An email dated July 5, three days after the Schoof Cabinet took office, mentions this. “As expected, pressure will be exerted on this,” a civil servant wrote there. In another memo about 130 km/h, another civil servant wrote that the Minister “informally indicated that the speed increase is his first, second, and third priority.”

In that same memo, the civil servants note that the increase is “detrimental to road safety, noise, air quality, nitrogen, and has only a limited/local effect on travel time.” Despite Madlener pushing to increase the speed limit on all highways, the officials focused their attention on highways where an increased speed limit would affect nature reserves the least and would not lead to much more noise pollution.

Ultimately, Madlener increased the speed limit on four pieces of highway, amounting to 117 kilometers of the total 4,884 kilometers of highway in the Netherlands.