Dear Community, 

In light of the European Commission’s new road safety regulations, mandating speed limiters on vehicles by 2022 – we have now, going forward, had to prioritise all and only speed limit edits via our communities. 

In today’s world, we all know and see with our very eyes the impact of cars, roads and speed limits and how they can affect our everyday life. It is with this purpose and perspective that we also join the European Union in their Intelligent Speed Assistance ‘ISA’ project.  

What exactly is behind the ISA project? 

The push for mandatory speed limiters has been spearheaded by the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC), which says the limiters will reduce traffic collisions by 30% and save 25,000 lives within 15 years of coming into force. Following political agreement from the European Parliament, Council and Commission, the proposals are now set to be formally approved by the European Parliament and Council 

More details can be found in this article: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/103530/uk-set-to-adopt-eu-mandated-speed-limiters

We want to ensure we can also help with increasing to safety of our roads with increased knowledge and accuracy of speed limits on our roads. Our communities are a valued part of our crowd sourcing data and ultimately, it is you using your local knowledge and skills helping to make your areas safer. 

How will this affect your activities in Map Creator?  

Since speed limits are priority, for the next couple of months we won’t be able to dedicate our full capacity to ingestion of other edits. For example, it might happen you edit a turn restriction or one way, and it takes longer than usual to process it. We understand this might become frustrating and we are truly sorry for that. Good news is this is temporary, and in the meantime, your focus is perhaps more on speed limit edits. Those edits will for sure make an impact. 

We are already running our own special dedicated speed limit campaigns within our Map Alert functionality – more details can be found here – https://whats-new-uk.blog/2021/07/14/the-speedit-isa-challenge-has-started/  

Your usual map creator edits are also welcomed, and as detailed, it will be these that will be prioritized.  

Being a mapper can sometimes feel a bit like Sisyphean effort: you are helping document a real world that is constantly changing. We want you to know that all your edits matter.  

From the whole of the western Europe community team thank you for your contribution and understanding. 

Frida-Grâce, Paolo, Francesco, Belén, Claire, Pedro, Georg and Eric