"Post my face, wanted dead or alive
Take my license, all that jive
I can’t drive 55!"
–Sammy Hagar
I’m always amused by the speed demons’ rationale for removing posted limits from the nation’s highways. The argument goes that high speed limits don’t cause fatalities; unskilled drivers do. The bad guys are "insurance industry Nazis" who want everybody to potter along at 55.
I just came back from a visit to upstate New York, where a classmate of my 16-year-old nephew has just become paralyzed from the waist down after speeding too fast for conditions, then swerving to avoid a dump truck. The car ended up on its roof, and he’ll never walk again. He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.
Listen up, folks, the U.S. was once the world’s traffic safety leader, but now we’re ninth. We have chronic speeders, low rates of seatbelt compliance, high rates of drunken driving, way too many SUVs (with a severe rollover danger) and motorcyclists who think it’s cool to leave their helmets at home. As the New York Times reports, if our accident rate had kept pace with Canada, 2,000 fewer Americans would die every year, and if it was the same as England’s, 8,500 lives would be spared.
In 2002, 42,815 Americans were killed in traffic accidents, the most since 1990. This despite the fact that cars are demonstrably safer than they were back then. In 2001, the U.S. had a death rate per 100 million miles traveled of 1.51. While it’s a dramatic drop from previous years, it compares poorly to Australia’s rate of 1.45 and Britain’s of 1.2. Which industrialized countries also have high rates? Consider Germany, whose speed-limit-free autobahns are considered a speed lover’s paradise: It has nearly as many traffic deaths annually as the U.S.
Conservative author Michael Fumento rails against speed limits, saying states that abandoned 55 actually saw death rates fall. Nonsense. A recent study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety concludes more deaths are occurring because carmakers (at the speed demons’ request, spurred on by performance-oriented magazines like Car and Driver) are putting more horsepower under the hood, and people are using it to drive faster — much faster than posted speed limits.
States that raised their limits to 70 mph or more (all in the west) saw an average of 35-percent more traffic deaths. A study in New Zealand found that increasing speed limits from 55 to 75 mph increased deaths by a similar 38 percent. "Pushing speeds to the limit is what’s marketed on television," the institute said. Safety was emphasized in only 2 percent of car ads studied.
Ah, you say, this is information from "insurance industry Nazis." The aforementioned Car and Driver posted the insurance industry study on its Web site and invited comment. "This is part of the propaganda campaign to keep speed limits artificially low," claimed one poster. A "Ferrari admirer" rested his case by pointing out that the fatality rate continues to drop. That’s true, but the rate hasn’t fallen as much as it should have (given safety improvements), and not nearly as fast as in other countries where breaking the sound barrier is not quite as important.
I keep thinking of that upstate New York teenager. If he’d lived in Australia or Canada, where the pace is a bit slower and police can stop drivers simply for not wearing their seatbelts, he’d probably have been buckled up. And he might not be in a wheelchair for life.
