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Texas Opens Fastest US Highway With 85 MPH Limit
Hugh Pickens writes "Most highways in the U.S. top out at 75 mph, while some highways in rural West Texas and Utah have 80 mph speed limits. All that is about to change as Texas opens a stretch of highway with the highest speed limit in the country, giving eager drivers a chance to rip through a trip between two of the state's largest metropolitan areas at 85 mph for a 41-mile toll road between Austin and San Antonio. While some drivers will want to test their horsepower and radar detectors, others are asking if safety is taking a backseat. A 2009 report in the American Journal of Public Health found that more than 12,500 deaths were attributable to increases in speed limits on all kinds of roads and that rural highways showed a 9.1 percent increase in fatalities on roads where speed limits were raised. 'If you're looking at an 85 mph speed limit, we could possibly see drivers going 95 up to 100 miles per hour,' says Sandra Helin, president of the Southwestern Insurance Information Service. 'When you get to those speeds, your accidents are going to be a lot worse. You're going to have a lot more fatalities.'"
Like anything else, the stupid and unskilled will kill themselves off, leaving behind a stronger more fit population capable of handling such conditions.
Just like when they allowed concealed and open carry in places where before you couldnt, including bars...the hotshots and cowboys quickly removed themselves from the genepool, leaving behind a smarter, more polite, population.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Flow of traffic is irrelevant. I will drive at a speed I deem safe, regardless of what the herd is doing. If I'm doing the speed limit in the far left lane you have no right to bitch.
Good-bye
There is a simple solution to the speeding problem. The stretch is 41 miles. Just put a station at each end. At 85 miles per hour, the shortest possible time you can make that distance in going at the speed limit the entire way is about 28 minutes, 56 seconds. If someone arrives at the second station in less time, write him/her a ticket, and make the individual sit there until enough time has elapsed for a person who left at the same time, who actually obeyed the speed limit to arrive. Require the person to sit in the driver's seat, hands on the wheel, engine, radio, etc. off, while staring straight ahead, eyes open, as a further punishment equal to the crime. Make sure that the stretch has nothing to do and nowhere to park, to discourage people from zipping through, then pulling over to take a nap before reaching the far end where the speed will be checked. Problem solved.
I honestly don't know why they don't already do this, because they could make it so that every stretch of road is 100% policed for speeding, rendering radar detectors useless. I'd also have marked cop cars go through and make sure no one was doing this same thing, speeding then stopping to chill out, by having a patrol on every stretch of road, ticketing any stopped cars, and flagging them for removal by towing. If everyone obeyed the speed limit, and everyone went the same speed on the freeways, accidents would fall to nearly zero. It's actually very hard for two cars going the same speed in the same direction to hit each other, unless they're driving along side one another. Think about it. If you have a mile of interstate, with 100 cars on it, all going 80 mph, each car would have an average of 53 feet, with even two lanes, each would have about 100 feet between it and the next one in its lane. With each extra lane the space between the same number of cars goes up. Now on the other hand, you start tossing into the mix a few cars going 50, 107, and a dozen or so doing 83, assuming that's close enough to 80 so that they won't get in trouble, and the spacing starts to shift around all over the place, everyone will have to be constantly adjusting their cars' speeds, and you get people making mistakes, running off the road, into each other, etc.
Speed is not the problem. People refusing to obey the speed limit IS. If we consider how much more kinetic energy vehicles had at speed, and like frightened children tell people not to drive that fast because they might get hurt, we'll end up with an interstate system with a 10 mile per hour speed limit. Sure fatalities would drop to nearly zero if people actually honored that, but then again, no one would be able to go anywhere because what used to be a 10 hour drive now takes a week and a half. Shit, it would be faster to go by fucking bicycle.
Or maybe that's the idea...