Very easy to lose track in Spain and a few other EU countries. In UK you always get a speed limit sign every time the limit changes. In some countries limits are nested within each other. ie. approaching a town you see a sign saying 70kph, later a 50kph. So far so good, but when you leave the 50 zone you see a 50 with a line through it, so you put your foot down only to find later a sign for 70 with a line through. In other words you have to remember the 50 bit lies within the 70 zone. More tricky of course if you have stopped overnight somewhere in between and haven’t a clue what signs you passed through yesterday.
It applies likewise with the 20kph zones. In some places the 20s can be even trickier, sometimes you get a 20, and nowhere does it tell you when the zone has finished, so you doddle along with an increasingly grumpy tail behind you. Sometimes you get an accompanying hump or crossing sign which gives you the clue that you only slow for the crossing or hump, but this is by no means consistently applied...so sometimes when you have already speeded up again you trip over an end of 20 sign...oops, bugger! That long road up the west side of northern Portugal is a continuous succession of such instance.
In France where they are grass or hedge cutting you get a 20 sign and a sign saying ‘faucharge’, you won’t get an end of restriction sign after this, you just speed up once you’ve passed the man with the machine. In Spain however you’ll get a 20 on a rural road, after 4 or 5k by which time you’ve stopped believing there is anything to slow down for you’ll suddenly catch up with the tractor, speed up then? Oh no, two or three k further on you’ll find an end of 20 sign.
You know those annoying 10kph signs on a nice smooth bit of road where it is alleged there are (once were) ‘gravillons’ (loose chippings), you know the ones everyone ignores! Well, once on a long 8k section of road so marked (fortunately someone had warned me), the French police had been booking every single car that went past for a week...even though the chippings had been well bedded down for some considerable time.
So much for European ‘harmonisation’!
