What is it with speed changes?

My first rant...

What is it with the powers at be changing speeds on roads?

Recently in my home town the council, I assume, has decided that a major dual lane road, Gatacre for those that know it, is no longer suitable to be traversed at 80kph. Instead the speed has been changed to 70. Now this isn't a short road, the visibility on most of it is very good and it is hardly a high traffic street, but alas some ning-nong has decided that every driver is crap and should be penalised as such... They couldn't even impose the speed restriction on the trouble spot, it had to be on the whole road. Now if that isn't a blatant excuse for revenue raising, I don't know what is...

Although I don't know the facts, this is my blog and I'm allowed to rant unashamedly uninformed, I believe the speed change was initiated because of a couple of accidents where people entered the above mentioned road from a side street, Johnston St. A number of times I have passed this side street and very regularly a car will pull out without having paused at the intersection. If the stop sign, I'll have to check if there is one, side street was policed more thoroughly, I'm sure the number of accidents would be reduced.

I noticed the same in Perth when I was visiting... Streets that I felt comfortable doing the speed limit of 80 along, I am no gung-ho driver, have been reduced to 70. The media keeps thrashing out that "Speed Kills" and that's fine, but I believe its the slow drivers that cause the accidents in a lot of cases. A road that has a speed limit of 100 will be fine as long as all the drivers are doing the same speed. Slow drivers cause frustration to the drivers that want to do the speed limit and in some cases these drivers attempt risky maneuvres to overtake, sometimes causing accidents.
Of course the finger gets pointed at the person overtaking, but had Mr.Slow been doing the speed limit in the first place, that accident may have never happened...