Texas May Go To 85! (Clovers Stroking Out All Over)by
Eric Peters Recently
by Eric Peters: Smart
Cars …
Maybe we’re over the hump. Texas appears to be on the verge of raising its highway speed limits to 85. That’s good news for Texas motorists, who may soon get to drive legally at speeds they travel anyway.
Which brings up a question: Why do they call those signs speed limits? A legitimate speed limit (not a speed that amounts to the de facto normal cruising speed or average traffic flow of most cars on the road, as current “speed limits” are) ought to be about 85-90 mph on most roads. It’s ridiculous that the “limit” – as we Americans define it – amounts to the speed most cars are cruising along at. A speed limit ought to be just that – the absolute maximum safe speed for that road under ideal conditions. It is absurd to take the position – as our system currently does – that the posted max is the maximum safe speed for the road. It implies that any car doing that speed is already pushing the envelope, operating right on the edge of recklessness. If so, all those people trundling along with the cruise control set at 70 don’t seem to be sweating it much. And given that probably 70 percent – likely a lowball figure – are actually exceeding the posted speed imit, you have to take the position that either a very large percentage of American drivers are cavalierly reckless drivers – or the “limit” is really nothing more than a politically prescribed number that corresponds to – usually – just slightly less than the average, ho-hum flow of traffic. A limit, it ain’t – except in a legal sense. Drive faster than the number painted on the sign and you place yourself in jeopardy of receiving a “speeding” ticket. It doesn’t mean anything more than that – even though our system imputes unsafe driving to it. This is perhaps the biggest con since the Federal Reserve. Consider: For about 20 years, no American could legally drive faster than 55 MPH on a U.S. Interstate Highway. On the same highways that had previously had significantly higher speed limits – 70, 75 MPH was common prior to 1974, when the 55 MPH edict went into effect. It suddenly became illegal to drive 70 or 75. But it didn’t become unsafe – unless you attribute magical powers to Congress, which imposed the 55 MPH limit – and then, just as magically repealed it in 1994. Did it, then, suddenly – miraculously - become “safe” to once again drive at 70 or 75 MPH on those very same roads? Of course not. But no refunds were given for the millions of “speeding” tickets given to hapless motorists during the 20 years prior. Nor did the insurance companies issues an apology – and a store credit – for surcharging all those ticketed drivers on the basis of their “speeding” and, hence, their (supposedly) unsafe driving.
Things have gotten better. In most parts of the country, highway limits are at least up to – roughly – the normal, average speed of traffic – which seems to be somewhere between 70 and 75 MPH. Few cars go much slower than that; not very many go much faster than that. Going by the 85th percentile rule – the method for setting speed limits that states and the federal government are supposed to abide by, which they have agreed to abide by but of course rarely do abide by – current highway speed limits, properly defined, ought to be around 85 MPH, just as Texas is proposing. The 85th percentile rule says observe the normal flow of traffic – conduct a traffic survey – and note the average speed of the cars traveling on that road. This observed average speed becomes the baseline from which the speed limit is extrapolated. The limit – properly defined – would be set 5-10 MPH higher than the observed average speed. With most traffic on most non-urban highways running around 70, the limit thus ought to be about 80. Maybe higher on really rural, lightly traveled highways (as in Texas) where a limit of 90 or even 100 mph would not be at all unreasonable. That’s how it’s supposed to be done. But of course, that’s not how it’s actually done. The 85th percentile rule is obeyed about as much as the rule that says Congress is supposed to declare war before we send “the troops” off to fight a war. The reason for this is obvious: There would be almost no need for traffic cops anymore; jobs would be lost – and revenue lost. A great deal of revenue. Some small towns (and even larger counties) depend on the cashflow generated by the local “speeding” racket for a huge chunk of their annual budgets. Everyone knows this. The officials barely even try to conceal the reality of the shakedown, for if “speeding” really were the homicidally reckless act they say it is, would they be giving people “breaks” at radar traps? Cutting the ticket down to 9 over instead of 13? Do we see such gentle, almost friendly, banter between cops and rapists? Of course we don’t. If routinely exceeding politically contrived “limits” were in fact dangerous and not just a scam to gin up money without imposing an explicit Motorists Tax, then our system is oddly kindhearted to all the millions upon millions of (cough) dangerous drivers out there. But of course, they’re not dangerous. Just guilty of ignoring a number pulled out of a hat and plastered into a sign bu politicians bureaucrats. The cops know it, the judges know it, the insurance companies know it, too. All the evidence says so, too. It was just announced that highway fatalities have dropped to their lowest level ever - even though people are driving faster and lately, legally so. By now, the idiot mantra that “speed kills” ought to be as discredited as neo-con Republican braying about “WMD.” Reprinted with permission from EricPetersAutos.com. April 11, 2011 Eric Peters [send him mail] is an automotive columnist and author of Automotive Atrocities and Road Hogs (2011). Visit his website. Copyright © 2011 Eric Peters
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