By Freddy Pawle For Daily Mail Australia
07:55 12 May 2023, updated 07:55 12 May 2023
- Mother unaware of 40km/h limit across Sydney CBD
- Was caught via speed camera travelling at 54km/h
A mother has raged about getting hit with a speeding fine after she failed to realise the entire Sydney CBD has a 40km/h limit.
The woman was driving along Elizabeth St in the city at about 11pm on Wednesday when she was pinged driving 14km/h over the limit.
She still would have been speeding if she had been in a 50km/h zone, however the fine would instead have been $124 and she would have lost just one demerit point. Instead, she copped a $288 fine and three demerit points.
The controversial 40km/h low speed limit zone stretches across the CBD from The Rocks to Central Station and Darling Harbour to Hyde Park – and the local council earlier this year proposed extending it even further.
Taking to Facebook to vent her frustrations, the mother wrote that she was driving her husband home at the time of the incident.
‘I never knew the entire city was a 40km/h zone and I didn’t see any 40km/h signs on Elizabeth St either.
‘As I went through the lights, a camera went off and hubby says ‘you were speeding!’.
‘I said ‘what? I was doing 54km/h!’ … What the F? Where are the signs?’
Other users chimed in on the fine in the comments, revealing they had also been unaware of the speed limit.
‘This exact thing happened to me! At the same spot too,’ one user wrote.
‘I thought it was 50km/h and didn’t realise it had all changed to 40km/h.’
The City of Sydney council voted to impose a blanket 40km/h zone on the CBD area earlier this year, in a proposal that was slammed by then-Premier Dominic Perrottet at the time.
‘We have to speed up our city not slow it down,’ Mr Perrottet said.
Lord Mayor Clove Moore told the Daily Telegraph then: ”A lot of motorists would say they are lucky to ever reach 40km/h in the city because of congestion, but we have to do this to protect pedestrians.
‘More than 70 per cent of journeys into the city are pedestrian-based. We want to make this a pedestrian city.’