>slashed from 60km/h (37mph) to 30km/h

> applies to residential roads with no centre line or maximum speed signs, media report

>The measures apply to about 870,000km of roads that are less than 5.5 metres wide and do not have centre lines or median strips, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. They account for about 70% of the country’s general roads, the newspaper said.

So basically they went from no effective speed limit (since most people will probably not drive 60kmh on those kinds of roads if left to their own devices) to a specific speed limit on a bunch of tiny roads that the overwhelming majority of people were probably already going pretty darn slow on for the most part.

I suspect this will just result in a bunch of roads that really were overdue for it getting center lines and specific posted limits getting them and not much change anywhere else.

Anec-data, but I was in japan recently on my honeymoon, was in some big and small cities, and I was shocked at how fast people were driving on exactly these types of roads. I grew up in a neighborhood where the speedlimit is 20mph, which is slightly higher than this new regulation, so fwiw I think I can recognize when cars are going faster than that as they wiz by me.

So I’m pretty optimistic about this change, better than they way things are now at least.