55 saves lives?

HA, the data is in. Raising speed limits above 55 has NOT killed tens of thousands of extra people every year as Mr Nader and so many others predicted when congress allowed states to set their own speed limits. Turns out death rates are down by over 17 percent since the limits were raised. Some would counter that it's because of better and safer cars, but to them I would point out that the limit was raised before SUV's became popular and also before the cellphone! Even taking into account how easy it is to roll your SUV while chatting with your girlfriend, the death rates are still down! Significantly down.

So once more, another prediction of doom and gloom has not only not come to pass, but been proved totally the opposite. unfortunately you wont hear about it on your local news channel as it's just not exciting. (although the wall street journal article I'm about to link to does compare the number of deaths on the highway anyway to the number of deaths in Iraq since the beginning of the war, so it's kind of tying into something newsworthy)

Enjoy reading how you're less likely to die on the highway now than you were then the nanny state had you tooling along at 55 at the Wall Street Journal

Not wanting to start an argument, but you are looking at:

1) an opinion piece (per the link, it's an editorial and not a news story)
2) A single set of statistics from two points 11 years apart.

It ignores many, many factors that might be the real reason for those numbers.

For instance, in 1999, all new commercial trucks and busses were required to have anti lock brakes.

Since 1995, traction control systems have become much more common.

SInce 1995 passenger side airbags have become mandatory

Since 1995, side air bags have become common

The article claims the figures came from the NTSB, but did not say what reports, so it's hard to double check.

If ithere was a true correlation as suggested in the article, The death rate should have dropped in 1996, and it should have dropped even further each year after that as other safety measures were put into place.

It's fun to take statistics out of context. Here's an example;

In 1995 my gas milage was 11 MPG.
In 2006 my gas milage is 47 MPG.
Obviously I get 4 times better gas milage driving at 65 instead of 55.

Oh, did I forget to say that I'm driving a different car now? Oops.




Daniel
P.S. I'm not wanting to start an argument, but young drivers look at information like this and use it as a base for their driving decisions. They don't take the physics lessons that would teach them why a car driving %15 faster has much more kinetetic energy. They don't really learn that driving 15% faster requires 25% more time /distance to react to an emergency. They do learn that 55 is unsafe.

I dont believe the article was trying to show that driving faster was safer. Just show us the danger in making dire predictions about things that to our minds seem self evident without backing them up with some research.

The number of deaths that were predicted by the folks that were so outraged at lifting the national speed limit would have canceled out all the gains of every other safety device. Instead they did not. One thing that may have made it safer is the fact that you have less of a range of speeds on the highway. It used to be that you had people driving 55 being blown past by people doing 80. If I'm doing 75, someone passing me at 80 is not such a big deal. It's safer when more people are going the same speed. At least, having driven on the highway, this is one thing obvious to me.

there are so many variables in something like this that you can't say driving faster is safer. But you CAN say that the predictions of doom were completely off the mark. Which is all the article was really saying. We can have reasonable speed limits and still be safer driving them that we were at slower speed limits. As usual, national legislation looks at the wrong parameters to adjust to solve a problem

The gas milage is a real tradeoff though. Driving faster can use a lot more gas depending on the type of car you own. But it doesn't have to, my little wagon gets WAY better milage on the highway at 70mph than even my old sedan did due to much better aerodynamics in addition to better engine tech. your SUV may not see the same gains

It's not speed or .08% alcohol levels that kill - it's mostly unqualified drivers who receive an easy license to kill. It takes but a bare minimum of ability to get a driver's license in the USA.

The only solution to saving lives is MUCH stricter licensing requirements and retesting every ten years or less. Tough penalties and enforcement of idiots who, through carelessness, cause serious accidents.

Testing at 65 mph and icy conditions should be mandatory. Drivers should be GOOD, not merely "passable", to receive a license. This is a NATIONAL SECURITY issue as we kill over 40,000 every year, plus seriously injure over 100k.

The fabulous sums that are wasted could bring the highway death toll to a few thousand injured or killed. Again, it's all politics and the fact we don't demand better.

But you CAN say that the predictions of doom were completely off the mark.

Click to expand...

That may be true, but I don't think you can deduce that from the statistics that were given. We can't tell from that one measure how many MORE lives would have been saved if we had the improved tires, safety standards, equipment and the lower speed limits too. The only way to find out would have been to pick two states that were 100% equal in all areas (including demographics, geographics, laws and enforcement standards) and leave one at 65 and drop the other to 55. We did not do that.


I think it would be a neat test to do.

Daniel

Point #1: Short of a controlled experiment, the best indication of the impact of a change is to capture what happens in a time period just before and just after the change, in this case perhaps the year before and the year after. And to get many data points e.g. across many states. Over longer periods too many other things change that impact the stats, which is I believe the point of several in these posts. Has anyone done that?

Point #2: fundamentally/logically: higher speeds result in more deaths, other things the same. How else could it be? For example in a head on crash, at 1 mph no one would get killed; at 10 mph very few, at 100 mph most. Other examples I believe would bear out that the faster the higher the probability of death.

Then the only question is how big of an impact is the change, and is it "worth it". If 55 to 65 causes one more death, is it worth it? This is so complicated that I don't even want to get into it and I don't think anyone can clearly say: the power of democracy keeps the thing on track somehow!

jayflash said:

It's not speed or .08% alcohol levels that kill - it's mostly unqualified drivers who receive an easy license to kill. It takes but a bare minimum of ability to get a driver's license in the USA.

The only solution to saving lives is MUCH stricter licensing requirements and retesting every ten years or less. Tough penalties and enforcement of idiots who, through carelessness, cause serious accidents.

Testing at 65 mph and icy conditions should be mandatory. Drivers should be GOOD, not merely "passable", to receive a license. This is a NATIONAL SECURITY issue as we kill over 40,000 every year, plus seriously injure over 100k.

The fabulous sums that are wasted could bring the highway death toll to a few thousand injured or killed. Again, it's all politics and the fact we don't demand better.

Click to expand...

AMEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It is WAY to easy to get a license here... Real driver training should be manditory for all. The hardest thing on the test was and still is parallel parking! Screw emmisions tests and bring back safety tests!

And to answer the original question, absolutely NOT. In tests conducted where 55mph was very strictly enforced it was proven LESS SAFE not more safe!

http://americanautobahn.com/

Where in the US was there ever a scientifically valid test that showed that a strictly enforced 55 was less safe? I'd like to study such a report.

A few months back there was a series of posts asserting that everyone speeds. It was decided that without a radar gun it was difficult to verify that assertion. The very next month I did an infromal experiment on a 1,000 mile trip from SF (Calif) to mid Oregon and back. Here's what I observed.

The road conditions were dry and clear. We drove up on a weekday and back on a weekend, so we saw largely professional drivers one day and largely recreational drivers the next. Gas prices were high, but not near the all time highs, so people were not driving abnormally slow to save gas. Traffic was moderate, in that I was never on a stretch of road where there was not at least 5 cars in view that were traveling teh same direction as I was. The traffic was never so heavy that the traffic was bumper to bumper. The road was never less than 2 lanes in each direction.

The method? Simple. I just counted the number of cars that passed me per hour, and kept my cruise control set exactly at the speed limit.

The results? There are actually two results. One for rural areas and one for populated areas.

Rural: in the long stretches outside the city, I was passed by fewer than 15 cars an hour. These where the stretches where driving 70 instead of 65 would have shaved 30 minutes off a 6 hour trip.

City: In areas where the freeway went through populated areas, I'd be passed by a car a minute (or more). There was no attempt to quantify their speed.

Conclusion; Most people only drive on freeways short distances. If that makes sense, because other wise they'd be far, far from home by the end of the week. People exceed the speed limit much more frequently when they are making a short trip across town, where the excess speed saves them a minute, maybe two. I base this conclusion on the fact that once you leave the city suburbs, the incidence of people passing drops again.

This was not a scientific test, but it's easily repeatable.

Just thought I'd share.

Donovan said:

AMEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Real driver training should be manditory for all.

Click to expand...

Has it been proven that driver training helps? When I took driver training, you could get your license one year earlier if you took it. That's why we took it. The result was more accidents than would have occurred if there wasn't driver training..

One thing seems clear. Drivers under 25 years old, or somewhere around there, will always have more accidents. Many young drivers have an occasional accident and they usually say "It wasn't my fault". That's probably true, but it's irrelevant. When a driver logs a million miles without an accident, he has obviously figured out something and it apparently takes maturity and experience to learn it.

In drivers training we were taught defensive driving, but teaching a kid defensive driving is about as effective as teaching a poodle nuclear physics.

eluminator,

I would have to disagree. As a former professional driver, I KNOW that driver training helps, but it has to be driver TRAINING, not driver education.

The difference is the difference between being a spectator and being a participant. Too many drivers watch the world go by, but have NO idea what they will do when a possible accident presents itself. TRAINED drivers, on the other hand, have been taught what to do and they have practiced what they will do to handle that situation.

For instance, you are driving 70 MPH down a 4 lane highway and a deer jumps in front of you. A TRAINED driver knows what the traffic situation around him is and steers around the deer, an untrained driver doesn't recognize that there is a car in his blind spot, tries to avoid it, whacks the car, hits the deer and then goes in the ditch.

Most people don't think about it, but what is the best alternative to a head on collision? ANYTHING else is the best alternative to a head on collision!! Two cars hitting each other at 60 miles an hour is an impact force of 120 miles per hour. Chances of survival, even with airbags are below 10 percent. A car driving off a cliff 100 feet high and hitting head on into a perfectly flat surface is about the same, but the truth is, most cars bounce off stuff, roll, tumble and otherwise dissipate some of that force. You stand a better chance driving off the cliff!

TRAINING helps, but you don't get it in driver education. What you get is this, "The way to handle a skid is to steer into it to regain control."

HUNH...! What the heck does that mean?

Anyone who has been in a skid and recovered knows, right? But how do they know, because they have experience, TRAINING, in other words, usually gained at someone elses expense, because they didn't know how to handle it the first time, or the second, or the third.

Training is not what you get in driver education classes, and unfortunately it's not what you get when you get a license. TRAINING has to be done off hours, in a parking lot or on a deserted road, where you can practice.

That's what training is, and everyone of you is right, driver education is NOT driver TRAINING.

I have 3 children who drive. They don't get their license until they have driver education passed, and then pass Dad's driver training class. Each of them had 5-7000 miles of driving before they got their licenses.

They have to pass snow skidpad driving, water skidpad driving, braking skills, (a lot easier with antilock breaks, BTW) and several other of my tests before they get there.

So far, after 12 years of cumulative driving: 1 accident, a fender bender in heavy traffic when the car ahead of my oldest daughter slammed on the breaks at 10 miles an hour and my daughter was distracted by something outside the vehicle for a second and thumped the SUV in front of her. 1 ticket, a speeding ticket for my youngest son when he was lost and trying to follow directions from a beautiful new date and got distracted. Both walked through the door and said, "I screwed up and wasn't paying enough attention" or words to that effect.

If you want better drivers, they have to be trained, and the training is OUR responsibility as parents, not someone elses, just like it's our responsibility to get them ready for life, not someone elses!

Back on topic, though, 55 doesn't save lives, good driving does.

Bill

Or you could live in europe, and have proper speed limits , and less road deaths, but that's probably cause we are better drivers and actually "control" our cars rather than just pressing the gas or brake One day you will realise the beauty of the "stick shift"

I don't know how much drivers education helps. It does establish a minimum level of training for both theory and hands on on experience. I'm pretty sure that it's more comprehensive than the hour of driving in a church parking lot that my oldest brother did.

My theory (not proven) is that no mater what you do, the first few years of driving will have the highest accident / injury rate. I remember hearing of a much touted law that reduced traffic deaths for teens by moving the driving age from 16 to 18. A few years later it was shown that the 18 to 21 death rate had soared a few years later when there was a sudden influx of new 18 year old drivers. I can't find a link to that study, and it may even have been 'urban myth' material.

Daniel

The BEST drivers are kids, the worst judgement is often exhibited by them.

Every study I know of or have heard of says that kids 16-25 have the best reaction times, quickest reflexes, and often the best motor control. Watch teenagers drive go-karts, they more often than not will kick the butt of the 40 year old guy with a quarter century of experience driving. In fact, most, if not all, race tracks have age as well as weight classes.

Car wrecks are a combination of 2 things, poor judgement and a bad situation. Good judgement in a bad situation may avoid it. Poor judgement in a good situation may still cause an accident. Sometime judgement is 99 percent of the problem, other times no amount of good judgement would avoid it.

Young people lack judgement for one reason, experience. Getting them experience, also called training, takes more than a driver education course.

My father used to say that good judgement came from wise application of lessons learned from bad experiences, which are usually caused by bad judgement!

Training would help. How many times did you have to be burned before you knew it was hot? Training works the same way. Train drivers right and the accident rates will go down, regardless of age.

That isn't to say that younger drivers won't have more accidents than similarly trained older drivers, that is still an issue of judgement!!

Bill

But properly training drivers is hard. Takes major overhauls to the current system. Much easier as a government to just make people drive slower even though it was not effective, that didn't matter, we had effective government that actually did something!

That which doesn't kill us tends to make us smarter.

Gadgets "testing" concurs with mine. Hwy 59 through and up out of Houston has a 65 MPH limit in the City Limits. It drops to 60 and then 55 through Humble.

For the most part I set cruise control on 65. In the City limits I might as well be parked. Cars, trucks, SUVs and 18 wheelers SCREAM past on either side.

Once past Humble/Kingwood it stays 65 to just north of Cleveland. But from Humble to Shepherd I may go a LONG way without getting passed.

I got my driving experience in several vehicles. "Road Rat" Honda 600 coupe. 79 AMC Spirit AMX 4 speed Posi, lots of wet road sliding and skid control.

I've even had the Ram in a lurid slide or two. I KNOW how to drive!

Anyhow I would agree that the wider variation between those doing 55 and those doing 80+ would SEEM more dangerous than 70 to 80+ spreads.

I'm going to keep doing 65, unless it makes SENSE to go faster. I get pretty damn good mileage at 65!

PBJS's sigline expreses my feelings regarding, not only gun control, but control of society for political expediency. It's not guns, +55mph speed limits, alcohol, drugs, etc. that kill; it's poor judgement, lack of PROPER experience or skill level that kills.

The USA CAN afford REAL TRAINING with the $$$ saved by eliminating the hundreds of billions wasted patching up bodies, cars, property & life insurance payouts.

I hope I don't take this off topic, but I'm reminded of a discussion I read recently about adhering to W3c standards in web coding.

That discussion centered on the balance between the benefits of standards, and the advantages and expediency of breaking them when 'necessary'. The same kinds of arguments surface in that discussion and this one.

Some argued that 'skilled' coders, working in pressure-filled environments, shouldn't be 'hemmed in' by the standards of others, and should feel free to ignore the standards. Others argued that innovation and 'fun' are diminished by strict adherence to standards.

The other side argued that standards would make for a 'better' web, and were an indication of the maturity and judgement of the coder in question. Some said that disaster would come to those whose sites violate voluntary rules now, that might become mandatory in the future.

Now I think that the basic arguments in this thread (and other recent ones on speeding) are similar.

One the one hand you have those who value the best things that autos have to offer (speed, handling, acceleration), and on the other those that fear the worst they can give us (injury, mutilation, death).

And the problem is that both have to share the road. The Ricky Bobbys' (geez, the movie isn't even out yet) and the Nervous Nellies' both have to share the road. The young and skilled (with their suspect judgment), and the old and feeble (with their suspect reaction times).

The 'standards', whatever they are - however they are decided, are there to protect us on the road in the same way they do on the net...by keeping us all on the same page. If everyone on the web created their own tags and extensions to HTML, no single browser could read them all...and the Internet would be a joke. Same thing on the road...can I run a stop sign 'cause I'm a good driver and I'm in a hurry? I hope not.

And that's why I cuss the old fogie driving 35 on the highway as much as I do the soccer-mom going 90...because neither has the necessary respect for others to alter their driving styles for the sake of (we hope) safety.

Just like coding, try to drive the speed limit, try to use your blinker, and try to remember that the other guy is just strugglin' along like you are...give 'em a break...maybe they'll give you one some day.

Have to agree with bwaites about training. I took my first high speed driving course when I was twenty. I take a refresher course every five or six years at Lime Rock in Conneticut...I've gotten addicted to the skid pad - when it rains now I go out to my local mall after it closes and practice (only for ten minutes as the cops tend to show up wondering what the heck I'm doing if I hang around too long).

Cliff

Hi all,


Some interesting arguments hmmmm. Try this one:

In Netherlands 10% of all deadly accidents is caused by drunken drivers.
So if we get the 90% sober idiots of the road we save a huge amount of lives.
Besides that, with only 10% of cars left on the road even drunken drivers cause less accidents:lolsign:

I'm not buying the drunk drivers only cause 10% of the fatal accidents, it's a lot higher than that here in the states.

But PROPER training is the answer.

Cliffnopus, that's funny, I make my kids do exactly the same, (well, I get some practice/play in too!) but I'm lucky enough to have a big park parking lot a block away that has virtually no winter traffic, so we go there with the first snow, (and every other that we have time for.)

Bill