The issue of urban speed limits is a controversial one. The main concern of motorists is that "speed limits" will be defined too low for the sole purpose of filling state coffers. Other concerns arise about the strain on manual cars and increased pollution. Some research indicates that setting a speed limit too low can actually speed up traffic. The above concerns are not relieved when authorities misrepresent the situation.

The real key to "pedestrian safety" is speed limits matching the road to increase the likelihood that there will be no crash and thus impact speed will be zero. However, official propaganda sells lower urban limits by hinting that putting up a different sign automatically results in traffic slowing down to the number on the sign and that lowering a speed limit by 10kph will necessarily make a road safe for pedestrians. This is usually explained in terms of braking distance suggesting that the slower cars will hit more softly or not at all.

According to the Queensland DoT: "By the time a car travelling at 50 km/h has stopped under emergency braking, a car braking from 60 km/h would still be travelling at about 40 km/h. If hit at this speed, a pedestrian has an almost 60 per cent chance of being killed."

Unfortunately, in approximately 50% of vehicle-pedestrian collisions the vehicle driver doesn't react at all before colliding with the pedestrian so in the case of the 50kph driver the impact speed will be 50kph. This is partly due to the "sudden appearance" of the pedestrian. Accordingly, the braking distance graphs are particularly irrelevant to these crashes(see also discussion of braking distance in the page on speeding propaganda).

However the comparatively low speed of pedestrian crashes ("Ninety percent of pedestrian collisions involve cars driving at 45kph or less")creates a suspicion in the mind of the author that drivers travelling at more normal speeds are alert enough to avoid the collision and therefore don't show up in the stats.