Toward saner speed limits on highways

By ERIC PETERS

Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service

There ought to be blood in the streets; carnage everywhere. It's what we were promised by self-styled "safety" experts if Congress dropped the checkered flag by nixing the much-loathed 55-mph national speed limit.

But in the two years since Congress ditched the 55-mph albatross and gave states the right to establish their own maximum highway speed limits, fatality and accident rates have actually dropped.

The latest statistics, indeed, should provide some tasty garnish for the crow sandwich now being placed in front of such doomsayers as former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) chief Joan Claybrook and Clarence Ditlow, her cohort from the Center of Auto Safety.

Of the 36 states to set higher-than-55-mph interstate speed limits, the majority showed an improvement in traffic safety, according to a comprehensive new NHTSA report.

In California, where interstate speed limits are set at 70 mph, the fatality rate declined 4 percent between 1995 and 1996 — the best record since 1961. In Mississippi, the fatality rate dropped an impressive 21 percent after the highway limit was raised from 55 to 70 mph; on the much disparaged "Montanabahn" — where there are no specific daytime speed limits (the "reasonable and prudent" standard applies), fatalities dropped 5 percent between 1995 and 1996.

These results are not a statistical anomaly or a fluke; nationally, fatality rates have been declining for decades irrespective of arbitrary speed laws such as "Drive 55."

"The whole idea that changing speed limits was going to affect highway fatalities is a myth," said James J. Baxter of the National Motorists Association, a lobbying group that deserves a big chunk of the credit for getting rid of the stupid 55 mph law.

Baxter and others believe in the truism that most drivers are not suicidal or homicidal and therefore drive naturally at reasonable speeds — without some government bureaucrat telling them what that speed should be.

Traffic engineers have a scientific term for this: the "85th percentile" speed. This is the rate at which the majority of drivers on a given stretch of road under a given set of conditions will naturally drive.

On the typical American interstate, measured 85th percentile speeds are between 70-80 mph. This is the normal flow of traffic, regardless of posted limits. Only a small handful of drivers go faster than 80 mph, because most drivers are neither crazy nor suicidal.

The 85th percentile standard used to be the method engineers employed to set speed limits, which served as meaningful estimates of safe driving speeds motorists unfamiliar with a given road could use as a reference point.

Today, after 21 years of "55 Saves Lives," speed limit signs have become virtually meaningless to motorists, who have no way of evaluating whether the posted speed reflects any relationship to how fast or slow they ought to be driving.

Fifty-five miles-per-hour — or even 65 mph, for that matter — on a modern interstate highway in a modern car equipped with 4-wheel anti-lock brakes, overdrive and excellent modern tires is just silly. So most people ignore the unrealistic speed limits and keep a keen eye out for speed traps.

As time went by, most of us became very cynical and even contemptuous about modern speed enforcement.

The 55 mph speed inaugurated an era when limits became revenue enhancers — and the highway patrol turned into highwaymen, eroding public respect for and confidence in police forces in a way difficult to gauge. Instead of "To Serve and Protect," the new motto seemed to be: "To Harass and Collect."

Turning cops into armed tax collectors with quotas to fill and the weight of the state to enforce it has generated enormous public antipathy towards the police — a most unfortunate thing.

And the police themselves have been conditioned like modern Shutzstaffeln (SS) into rules and regulations droning automatons capable of neither independent judgment nor empathy for their victims.

At least now that 55 is history and the "safety" gurus have been exposed for the frauds they are, we're on our way toward saner traffic laws built on reason and sound engineering principles — not the bleatings of Inside-the-Beltway nags with nothing better to do with their time.

Eric Peters is a veteran Washington reporter who frequently writes about the impact of automotive regulations on consumers for publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Consumer's Research Magazine. He is a member of the Washington Automotive Press Association.