The head of the Spanish Road Traffic Office (DGT), Pere Navarro, justified the new speed limits with the high number of inner-city traffic deaths. “The speed up to now (50 km / h) was really nonsense,” he said. In 2019, the last normal year before the corona pandemic, 509 people died in urban road traffic in Spain. With the new top speeds, the risk of a pedestrian struck by a car dying by 80 percent.