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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.'"
It's in texas.
So. There's that.
"We could possibly see drivers going 95 up to 100 miles per hour."
Hate to break it to Sandra, but that's the usual speed in many parts of Texas.
Well, that's 136km/h - that's what our recommended travelling speed (130) on the "Autobahn" is in Germany.
It has proven to be an excellent balance between emission (gears and cars are tuned to that speed), moving forward, but not braking too much due to other people's influences.
Once again I have deep mis-respect for you "best country in the world" guys.
Don't like the higher speed limit? Don't drive on it.
Doesn't get any simpler than that.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
With a speed limit of 10mph, you can virtually eliminate car related deaths on highways!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The sad fact is that its not speed that kills, its differential speed. Unfortunately our drivers training here is not really up to the standards it should be with modern machines. If you look at Germany they take drivers ed a lot more seriously, as well as licencing, with 6 month courses costing thousands of dollars being the norm. As well the rules of the Autobahn are strictly enforced, if you're going slow in the left lane you WILL be pulled over, just as quick if not quicker than you would for "speeding". Same with sudden lane changes, and just general bad driving. Speed doesnt kill, dumb drivers do.
What, in TEXAS? If anything, he can be blamed (he's the devil) there.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
The German Autobahn's have no speed limits in rural areas. I have driven at 160 Kph (i.e., 100 mph) and been routinely passed by faster vehicles. In fact, if you are in the left lane at that speed, they may get pretty annoyed with you if you don't get over immediately.
My understanding is that the German Auto Club serves a function much like the US NRA. Touch the speed limit, and your political career will be limited.
That happens anytime you raise the speed limit. from 55 to 65. from 45 to 55. from 10 to 20. We've already had this argument brought up multiple times, and you lost. Take that argument and go away.
Statistically speaking anyway, once you're hurtling down the road at 65 mph or faster, you're already well over the curve for speed-to-lethality tradeoff. Dropping your odds of survival from 2% to 1.8% really doesn't impress me that much.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Just stay out of the left lane when not passing and driving will be much safer for everyone.
If it's a toll road and you have to some to a complete stop or at least slow down dramatically to pay with coins or read your transponder every few miles, you're net actual speed may not be that much higher than a 70mph road with no obstructions (depending on number and wait times at toll booths)
Some view freedom as a teenager: I can do anything I want, damn the consequences.
Some view freedom as an adult: I can do anything I want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.
When you speed, you put other lives at risk, not just your own.
Freedom does not mean freedom from responsibility. In fact, in a land of people who don't act with responsibility, real freedom pretty much doesn't exist either.
You can see these same problems in the debate on drug use, on healthcare, etc. Some people are just immature and believe freedom means the consequences of their actions don't figure into their conception of freedom.
"Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins"
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ehhh sorry, I have lived for nearly 20 years here and I would like to ask where these courtious, follow the rules and don't try to do anything stupid drivers are. You see I have a car that can, and have driven 250 KPH. Let me tell you there are more idiots out there than you let on. I can't tell you how often I have to slow down from 230 to 120 because a driver feels he has the right to a pass a truck doing 80. Yes folks trucks are allowed a maximum of 80.
You can drive safely at high speeds if people realize that you are driving at highspeeds and I will argue that even Americans clue into it.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Then you really dont have to worry about anything. of course when traveling back and forth in time i could always collide with another vehicle. Oh and i also need lightning.
Differential speed is what kills. Study after study has shown that those at greatest risk of injury or death are the SLOWEST 10% of drivers not the fastest 10%
I live in Italy. The highway speed limit here is 130 km/h (81 mph), 90 km/h (56 mph) on normal roads and 50 km/h (31 mph) inside the cities, with some 30 km/h areas. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate (OECD data) there are 8.7 road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year and 12 per 100,000 motor vehicles. The corresponding figures for the U.S.A. are 12.3 and 15. That's 41% and 25% more respectively. It hints that speed limits don't necessarily have a direct correlation with deaths. Cars, road conditions and (most important of all) driver behavior make the difference. Keep your eyes on the road is the first recommendation I can't think about (btw, there are 1.47 mobile phones per person in Italy vs 1.039 in the USA - found on wikipedia - so it's not texting or calling that accounts for the difference - many people do that while driving here). That said, I welcome raising speed limits a little: it's good for Americans that will get home earlier and good for European tourists that won't fall asleep driving on straight roads at 55 mph anymore :-)
For those of us who don't know mph, here's some conversions to km/h:
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+85+mph+in+kph (etc)
100mph =~ 160.934km/h (by definition)
95mph =~ 152.9
90mph =~ 144.8km/h
85mph = ~136.8km/h (motorways in Italy, among other countries, have speed limits of 130km/h)
80mph =~ 128.7km/h
75mph =~ 128.7km/h
74.5mph =~ 120km/h (this is the motorway speed limit in Ireland)
70mph =~ 112.65 km/h (this is the motorway speed limit in the UK)
Germany (and most of Europe, for that matter) makes it much harder and more expensive to get a driving license than the US, and provides much better alternatives to driving for getting from point A to point B than does the US.
So that's hardly surprising.
I drive a pretty nice 2000 300+HP car. I also drive a 1980 180HP truck. There is no way I'd drive my truck like I do my sports car. It doesn't have crash impact standards, no air bags, no ABS, rear drums, steering gear. I'm happy a 65mph in that thing.
Now get in my 300HP car with traction control, airbags, a super suspension, 4 disc brakes, rack & pinion steering. I am happy at 80mph. Newer versions of my car are happy at 100mph. I was positively horrified when I got stuck doing just the speed limit the other day. It was _so_slow. 5mph difference at 40mph is a huge percentage (12.5%) whereas at 80, it's 6% of the speed limit
Over the years, we get better at making things safer. Better rubber, suspensions, steering, aerodynamics. It should be true that we can drive faster on the same roads given overall equipment improvement.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
When I was stationed in (middle-of-nowhere) Texas in 1987--8, the drivers were courteous to a fault, and pulling over onto the (fully paved) shoulder to allow a faster car overtaking one was the norm.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The 1980's 55 MPH federal mandate was not done to save lives. It was done to conserve energy. In fact, some states at the time even issued tickets for people driving over 55 that read "failure to conserve energy", not "speeding". The federal government still has its hands in regulating energy used by cars. Although we have now learned that it is more effective to regulate at the manufacturing stage, not at the operating stage.
I've been to the North-East US and understand that most roads in Europe look the same, so here's what's to know about this road:
- This road is where there is a lot of flat land. Even at 85 you can see where you will be in a few minutes (and virtually not take a turn until you get there). You can also see any animals that may enter this road, but it's mostly a bridge anyway which avoids that.
- There's nothing to see on this road. No billboards or distractions. No gas stations, restaurants, few farm houses. Few exits.
- The road has heavy steel guard rails that would stop most anything driving along it. These rails are after over a car lane of margin. A few places don't where it's just flatland for 1000s of feet.
- The state-standard noisy edge-of-the-road keeps drivers from hitting the road's guard rails.
- If I drove you on it blindfolded (in a car whose engine noise doesn't give away the speed like mine does), you'd think we were driving - Very light traffic. No old cars
- The biggest risk was just getting bored, & speed helps this.
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I've seen Autobahn drivers - they're mostly courtious, follow the rules, and usually don't do anything stupid.
Here we're talking about Americans - specifically Texans. Expect to see many many shoot outs, accidents, law suits and fatalities.
In Texas you will see beat up old 1970's pickup trucks trying to do 100 mph. Things weren't geared for it and generally don't have speed rated tires. Probably more fatalities from blow-outs at speed than any other non-alcohol/drug related incidents.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You sound like a dangerous idiot. So you've got some right to streak pass trucks and other traffic at a differential speed of 150 yet somebody doing 120 isn't allowed to overtake the same truck? I've seen more idiots like you on the autobahnen than I care to remember (and I've got a car which can do considerably more than 250 - which basically any hot hatch can do these days).
I think it's because of the effect it could have on all the car analogies. Raising the speed limit might subtly alter the impact of such arguments, strengthen some or totally invalidate others.
If you think of the car analogies we routinely use to explain technical subjects to a non-technical audience as cars, our shared cultural assumptions about cars (how many wheels & doors they have, how fast you are allowed to drive them, etc.) are like the fuel those cars run on. Changing the rules is like changing the fuel. Some will run better, other worse or not at all.
--MarkusQ
There is nothing unsafe about driving very fast on roads designed for driving very fast. You are FAR safer driving on a restricted-access divided highway at 100 MPH than you are driving on a 45 MPH city street with cross traffic, or a country road. Especially now that many states are putting up those cables in the median that prevent cars from getting across into oncoming traffic.
Even the article summary has to grasp for straws in trying to provide a "balanced" summary.... this 85 MPH divided highway is apparently unsafe because.... driving fast on country roads increases fatalities!
But a divided highway is not a country road.
Accidents between two cars going in the same direction at relatively the same speed (+/- 10-15 mph) are rare. It's the car going 35 MPH+ one way that encounters another car going 35 MPH+ in a different direction (hed-on or cross traffic) that kills people. Divided highway fatalities are usually coming up on stopped traffic in fog or at night, or falling asleep and leaving the highway.
One more point to note ... if you're going to get in a single-car accident at 65 MPH and hit a pylon or something, you're dead. If you do it at 85 or 90 MPH, you're just REALLY dead. Same difference.
paintball
I'm not saying you're wrong, but look at it from the other car's perspective. They're gaining on the truck at 40 KPH, which is fairly quick, and they check their mirror and see nothing so they go for the pass. Before they get around the truck you've shown up gaining on them at 130 KPH. Before they can accelerate out of the way you have to slow down to avoid rear-ending them.
No one is at fault for this - it's just the nature of a road system that allows such diverse speeds. In the US on roads which allow high speeds, typically greater than 60mph, there is also a minimum speed not more than 30mph below the maximum. If you don't have a maximum speed designated for the road it's much harder to manage a minimum speed.
One thought I've had is to have speed ranges defined per lane. It works best on roads with 3 or more lanes. Lane 1 would be 50-100 KPH, lane 2 would be 80 - 150 KPH, lane 3 would be 130 - 200 KPH, lane 4 would be 180 - unlimited KPH.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Back in 1987 I drove across the country from LA to Pittsburgh, including across Texas on I-10. I was running 90 MPH on most of that stretch, and the _semi trucks_ were blowing my doors off, never mind the cars. When the mover arrived with our stuff (I left before him), I asked him about it. He said he regularly ran 110 to 120 going across Texas. The then-new high powered, slippery semi trucks had no problem with those speeds.
Realize that a good part of that stretch of I-10 is literally flatter* than a pancake, and originally had one or more stretches that ran 300 miles without a curve, and dam* few exits. They later added some curves just to keep people awake, after they found people were nodding off and leaving the highway in unplanned ways.
* someone tested the 'flat as a pancake' meme (IIRC about Nebraska, but it applies here as well). It turns out that if Nebraska were scaled down to pancake size, it would be an order of magnitude flatter than a typical pancake. When I lived in Houston I figured the reason that folks build big stuff there is just to provide something interesting on the horizon.
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There are so many alarmist statements in the article where to start? Best to lower all the speed limits to zero and take the train. How about we test removing speed limits all together? They are arbitrary anyways based on best road conditions, and for the majority of vehicles and vehicle types that use the road. How would a limitless road work? Instead of fining for speed we fine for hitting other vehicles (Rule 1: don't hit things), being a douchbag (Rule 2: be courteous and respect rules of the road, like not driving in the left lane from trip start to finish, merging properly and allowing vehicles to merge), driving too fast for conditions - which would include driving way to fast down a crowded city street, if you have no chance to react to pedestrians or bikers or whatever, you are going to fast. (for extra credit: for all you that think driving 55mph/90kph should be the maxium because of fuel economy, think of the lives that are lost because drivers fall asleep because they are bored, or start texting because they are bored. Driving faster increases excitement and the involvement of the driver. Lord forbid we actually have some fun.)
Years ago when we finally got rid of the double nickle speed limit there were people predicting carnage on the nations highways. I tried to run the numbers and came up with inconsistent results. Here's a couple of stats I remember from that era:
AAA reported that over eighty percent of injury accidents occur at speeds under forty miles per hour and within a few miles of home. This was in their monthly magazine.
At the same time it was widely reported that half of all traffic fatalities were the result of intoxicated drivers. (Alcohol, drugs.)
Those two stats leave very little room for accidents on high speed freeways where speed is the sole factor in the accident.
The design ideal for a speed limit is to set it at the 85th percentile of the speeds typical drivers drive in average conditions. That means that 15 percent of drivers will likely exceed the empirical design speed limit.
The typical speeder drives 5-15 mph over the speed limit because they would otherwise be within the top 15 percent, and because it does not make them so obtrusive that they are likely to get caught.
Ms. Helin and her ilk (every speed limit change or recommendation brings one crawling out of the woodwork) would have the speed limit set so that the people otherwise traveling at 5-15mph over the speed limit (otherwise within the 15 percent) are traveling at what would approximately be the 85th percentile speed, effectively compressing the high tail of the statistical distribution due to the aforementioned effect of law enforcement.
This means (following their proscription) that the actual speed limit must be set well below the 85th percentile speed, such as... let's pick the 50th percentile because it makes for very easy reference and math later on... are the 35 percent, otherwise in the 50th-85th percentile speed range, from a design perspective only, unreasonably dangerous for traveling at their preferred speed? Of course, from a legal perspective they are 'lawbreakers.'
Most importantly, the difference between the 50th percentile and the 85th percentile, if you have a gaussian distribution of speeds, is 1 standard deviation. The difference between the 85th and 95th percentile is another whole standard deviation.
The difference between the 95th percentile and the 99th percentile is yet another standard deviation.
Who is your 15 mph speeder? Are they traveling at the 95th percentile speed... the 99th percentile speed?
Very roughtly, since the distribution shape will of course change and not be gaussian with speed enforcement, if it ever was to begin with:
To restrain that second standard deviation -- 10 percent -- by artifically lowering the speed limit, are you willing to make 35 percent of people drive below their preferred speed?
To restrain that third standard deviation -- 14 percent in total -- by artificially lowering the speed limit, are you willing to make b>70 percent of people drive below their preferred speed?
Of course this all depends upon how those 5-15mph speeders fit within the tail of the distribution. But in general, the insurance instrustry says "Yes!." And this is why you (with varying but non-trivial probability) are a lawbreaker.
That happens anytime you raise the speed limit. from 55 to 65.
Accident rates in Colorado lowered when they raised the speed limit from 65 to 75.
One good reason you are not accounting for is that no matter what the speed limit is, drivers drive at a speed they consider comfortable on a highway. That means that people like you imperil everyone else by sticking close to an old and arbitrary speed limit. Once you raise the limits there is a much greater equalization of people driving around the same speed, making the whole road safer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If California is on par with the rest of the states wrt drivers tests, then yeah, having an autobahn (which I have driven on during a vacation) would be a very, very bad idea in the states. Driving is a privilege not a right, you should have to work hard to get it (learn to drive and be tested accordingly).
Be glad you're in California, it's actually got one of the better driver training & licensing programs in the country. In the Midwest the program seems to be, "let's assume you've been driving your Father's tractor since 8 years old and call that equivalent experience". Out East I've had natives in New Jersey honk at me for not turning left across traffic at a red light; what lack of training is needed to think that is acceptable should be criminal. California may not have the most courteous drivers, but it could be a lot worse...
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You don't think road crews in America check to make sure the highways they build are level? You don't know what you're talking about.
I lived in northern Nevada, and I saw the statistics when they increased the speed limits. Interestingly, while the number of fatalities went up, the number of accidents went down. That seems odd until you look at the most common type of accident: single-car rollover caused by driver inattention. In other words, the driver fell asleep at the wheel and ran off the road. The faster you're going, the more likely that kind of accident is to kill you. OTOH, the faster you drive the less time you spend on the road, the less tired you get and the less chance you have to fall asleep in the first place. So, fewer accidents but when one happens it's more severe.
And, should we care about these accidents? They don't involve other cars, the only person injured or killed was the cause of the accident. I can't get nearly as worked up about someone getting killed because of their own stupidity as about say a family getting killed because someone else T-boned their car. And remember, these high-speed stretches aren't surface streets, or even urban freeways. They're rural freeways. In Nevada we're talking roads where you can go 10-20 miles between bends in the road, and where you may see another car every hour or so. On 300-400 mile trips that extra speed cuts significant time off the trip (for a 300-mile no-need-to-stop stretch 75mph vs. 55mph means 4 hours vs. 5.4, or close to an hour and a half less time at the faster speed limit) which again means you spend less time driving tired.
Still done that way today. I occasionally take SH 79 back and forth between Austin and Hearne, which is a 65mph road with one lane in each direction for the vast majority of it. Even when the difference in speed is minimal, a large percentage of drivers will use the shoulder as a "get out of the way" lane to allow someone to pass if they're unable to get around on their own due to oncoming traffic. There have only been a small handful of times that I haven't seen that happen, and even then, those drivers were still going at least the speed limit.
Texas drivers still don't honk at each other either. I've seen people sit through two full cycles of a stop light without honking at the car at the front of the line that for some reason didn't go either time. Having grown up in south Florida, which has a very northeastern U.S. culture due to all the snowbirds down there (i.e. honking is a way of expressing the fact that the light is almost green and you haven't started rolling forward yet) , it continues to boggle my mind.