Flex time: Raise (and lower) the speed limits
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The standard recipe for a speed trap-- blue sky and dry pavement-- would be modified under this essayist's proposal.flickr/vgm8383
In the wide open plains of central Texas, a new addition to State Highway 130 has just opened for business with a compelling marketing hook: Its speed limit of 85 MPH is the highest in America.
The 41-mile toll road connects Seguin to Mustang Ridge. The former is a distant exurb of San Antonio that calls itself "the pecan capital of the world." The latter, population 861, is a notorious speed trap. So if you've been dying to go nowhere fast, it just got a tiny bit easier. At 85 MPH, the journey between these two burgs takes just 28 minutes and 56 seconds.
There were 32,310 traffic fatalities in the United States in 2011, the fewest there have been since 1949. More importantly, fatality rates per 100 million vehicle miles traveled have dropped substantially over the years, falling from 24.09 in 1921 to 1.09 in 2011. In addition, while interstate highway speed limits have risen since Congress repealed all federally imposed speed limits in 1995, fatalities categorized as "speeding-related" by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have declined since then. Specifically, there were 13,414 speeding-related fatalities in 1995 and 10,591 in 2011. Of the 10,591 speeding-related fatalities in 2011, just 964 occurred on interstate highways with speed limits "over 55 MPH."
So even as critics contend that an 85 MPH speed limit will increase fatalities, it's no surprise that Texas is implementing the higher limit: driving in America has never been safer than it is now.
And if State Highway 130 proves popular with motorists, expect other states to increase their top speed limits too. Seguin and Mustang Ridge aren't the only small towns that would like to be a few minutes closer to larger metro regions that aggregate jobs, schools, and other opportunities.
But is Texas's bold speed limit move bold enough? In one of the most convincing proofs ever that the medium is the message, the speed limit signs of the early 20th century quickly solidified the notion that a single designated top speed could adequately govern traffic in a given area regardless of all other factors– not because this was in any way logical, but rather because that's what was technologically and economically feasible at the time.
Next, imagine that the speed limit on that highway is designed to encourage positive behavior rather than penalize bad behavior. In June, NPR reported that researchers funded in part by the NHTSA conducted a test in which they offered drivers a weekly $25 reward to comply with speed limits. Every time drivers exceeded a posted speed limit by five to eight miles per hour, they lost three cents from their potential prize money. Every time they exceeded a posted speed limit by nine or more miles per hour, they lost six cents.
Toll roads– like State Highway 130 in Texas– would make ideal labs for further experimentation. With users already paying mileage fees for access, compliance incentives could come in the form of discounts rather than explicit payments. In the case of State Highway 130, passenger cars and pickup trucks must pay 15 cents per mile to access the road. For daily commuters, such charges can add up quickly– so much so that, say, a 12-cent per mile discount rate for users who faithfully observe the speed limit might prove compelling. Or perhaps rather than a discount, a portion of the road's weekly usage fees could be set aside for a lottery for which only the non-speeders would be eligible.
In either scenario, the increasingly omniscient surveillance technologies that are already being deployed on roadways across the U.S. no longer seem quite so unilaterally oppressive. Motorists would be closely monitored, but in a way that potentially benefits rather than penalizes them. Combine that with speed limits that are nuanced, flexible, and determined by how motorists are actually using roads under variable conditions– and suddenly we'd have speed limits that no longer looked quite so much like relics from the Model T era.
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Greg Beato is a contributing editor at Reason, the libertarian mag where this essay first appeared.
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6 comments
Way to much surveillance on us everywhere. 1984 is coming true and we who are free are letting it.
1984 came and went twenty eight years ago. Not even Eric Blair could think up the things they're doing to us today
I'm fine with upping the highway speed limits to 85, if we lower the in town limits to 15 mph at the same time. This whole article assumes a legitimate risk-reward system for driving - that is, if you know driving at excessive speed means you might die, rational people drive at a reasonably safe speed without being required to by law.
But throw cars and bikes and people together in a city, and the internal corrections don't work. If you drive too fast, someone else might die. I'm sure the folks at Reason would agree that this equation does not carry the same weight to self-interested individuals.
Its very simple why accident death have fallen as speeds have risen. YOU SPEND LESS TIME ON THE ROAD.
Think about it, 10 minutes less to cover a certain distance, times millions of cars, times 365 days a years, is an ungodly number of hours of exposure eliminated.
Billions of dollars have been spent to make highways and the automobiles that travel them safer over the last quarter-century. How much money, time, and effort has been put into making DRIVERS safer during that same span of time?
And yet we still cant get cars to go when the light turns green here in town.