Texas to Open the Fastest Highway with 85 mph limit

[Forster]

These people have obviously never heard of Montana, where for a while we had no posted speed limit whatsoever.

Yeah I miss those days. But there really was a speed limit... called "reasonable and prudent". People got pulled over and got speeding tickets... problem was it was subjective and they'd try and fight the tickets in court which wasted lots of highway patrol men/women's time that was much better spent elsewhere. So as with most good things in life a few dickheads managed to ruin it for the rest of us.

 

[mlp]

Higher speeds certainly increase "roadkill" and that's a tragedy. I don't think it's right to go that fast where animals pass.

Agreed. That's the reason I became a much more speed limit abiding driver many years ago.

In fact, you could even say speed is a requirement of most fatal road accidents.

Not really. It doesn't take a whole lot of speed to kill.

Why specifically 'that fast'? Is there some speed at which roadkill increases very drastically or something?*

*are there even roadkill statistics?

The faster you are driving, the less chance you have to avoid running over an animal who is on the road or darts onto the road in front of you. For one, you'll be closer to the animal by the time you see it, the brain registers its presence, and you start to react. For another, the higher the speed, the riskier it is to swerve and the longer it takes you to come to a stop or something approaching a stop. Plain common sense.

I don't know that there are statistics on animals killed by cars in various speed zones, but simple observation makes the answer readily apparent.

 

[Forster]

I don't know that there are statistics on animals killed by cars in various speed zones, but simple observation makes the answer readily apparent.

There are other factors that come into play and IMO have more of an impact on animal/car collisions. Way more animals get killed on 2 lane roads, despite slower speeds, than on the interstates. Not disputing a correlation between speed = more collisions.

 

[shyvas]

There are other factors that come into play and IMO have more of an impact on animal/car collisions. Way more animals get killed on 2 lane roads, despite slower speeds, than on the interstates. Not disputing a correlation between speed = more collisions.

I'd say that it is because there are far more of them on small roads than on the busy ones.

 

[mlp]

There are other factors that come into play and IMO have more of an impact on animal/car collisions. Way more animals get killed on 2 lane roads, despite slower speeds, than on the interstates. Not street in the disputing a correlation between speed = more collisions.

Sure, and more animals get killed on a road that goes through a wildlife area than on a street downtown in a city.

The point is that, for any given kind of road in a given type of environment, more animals will be killed at faster speeds.

 

[mlp]

I'd say that it is because there are far more of them on small roads than on the busy ones.

Exactly.

 

[Forster]

I'd say that it is because there are far more of them on small roads than on the busy ones.

No, not really at least around here. What the interstates have are wide mowed shoulders to substantially increase visibility. Our interstates are not really that busy... which is why we used to have a "reasonable and prudent" speed limit.

 

[Forster]

Sure, and more animals get killed on a road that goes through a wildlife area than on a street downtown in a city.

The point is that, for any given kind of road in a given type of environment, more animals will be killed at faster speeds.

And I didn'tt dispute your point. My point was there are much more important factors than speed in determining vehicle/animal collisions.

 

[mlp]

And I didn'tt dispute your point. My point was there are much more important factors than speed in determining vehicle/animal collisions.

And are there any, apart from speed and attentiveness, that each of us as individual drivers can control? Apart, of course, from confining one's driving to the inner city and/or four lane highways.

 

[K-II]

Not really. It doesn't take a whole lot of speed to kill.

No, but I don't think many people die in road accidents where nothing involved was moving. Though some surely have managed...

The faster you are driving, the less chance you have to avoid running over an animal who is on the road or darts onto the road in front of you. For one, you'll be closer to the animal by the time you see it, the brain registers its presence, and you start to react. For another, the higher the speed, the riskier it is to swerve and the longer it takes you to come to a stop or something approaching a stop. Plain common sense.

I don't know that there are statistics on animals killed by cars in various speed zones, but simple observation makes the answer readily apparent.

Unless there's some sort of sudden change though, what makes for an acceptable trade-off between travel time and risk? Going from 75 to 85mph might make a very small difference for all we know, without actually having measured it.

 

[mlp]

Unless there's some sort of sudden change though, what makes for an acceptable trade-off between travel time and risk? Going from 75 to 85mph might make a very small difference for all we know, without actually having measured it.

The differences in numbers of human fatalities when speeds are changed actually have been studied. If you do a search, you should be able to find some of those studies.

 

[K-II]

From a few pages of google for various terms I mostly get (the same) government sites from a few different countries, handily telling us how much more danger we're in when we travel x speed beyond the legal limit (though not whether it changes as rapidly below it, nor whether the change is the same if the limit itself is raised/lowered as opposed to a vehicle speeding). Not really helpful for drawing any lines, with that information missing. They also seem to focus on speeding on low-speed limited roads (examples like 50kpm and 30mph, which are roughly equivalent), which isn't really very useful when looking at a maximum limit since those roads would probably be unsafe long before a freeway designed for high speed travel.

This site can be an example;

Excessive speed contributes to 24% of collisions in which someone is killed, 15% of crashes resulting in a serious injury and 14% of all injury collisions. In 2010, 241 people were killed in crashes involving someone exceeding the speed limit and a further 180 people died when someone was travelling too fast for the conditions.

^this is the sort of thing I mean, where they talk about speed in relation to existing limits.

Approximately two-thirds of all crashes in which people are killed or injured happen on roads with a speed limit of 30 mph or less.

Confirming that going fast on a road not meant for it is bad for your health. Although, this is leaving some things out which could be important, like whether people just spend more time overall on these roads.

The risk of a pedestrian who is hit by a car being killed increases slowly until impact speeds of around 30 mph. Above this speed, the risk increases rapidly, so that a pedestrian who is hit by a car travelling at between 30 mph and 40 mph is between 3.5 and 5.5 times more likely to be killed than if hit by a car travelling at below 30 mph.

Well, I guess now we know what it's like to BE roadkill.

If the speed is doubled then the braking distance is increased by four times.

This is sort of interesting. I actually imagined braking would be worse than that.

In the real world, a pedestrian may step out from a vehicle just in front of you.

Hm... so do I go slow enough not to kill him, or fast enough that he merely collides with the side of the car?

By contrast, a Canadian site: http://www.sense.bc.ca/research.htm

This one is pretty much the opposite of what I said earlier. Rather than focus specifically on going x over the speed limit, they're mainly looking at speed relative to traffic. Interesting to read, but still not really helpful to find an ideal maximum limit. I think it helps to explain why I can't find this information though. Speed relative to traffic is apparently a large part of the problem, and relatively higher speeds on a low-limit road are (possibly, I'm still sceptical of the information this one lacked) more dangerous than slightly higher speeds on an already high speed road. To find what I'm looking for, I think I'd almost have to build a fake freeway, and have a number of cars drive around it for quite a few years while slowly raising the speed limit, and being sure they all follow it fairly rigidly to avoid their speed relative to each other becoming a problem. And I don't think anyone is going to do that...

 

[K-II]

That test is actually quite funny, now that I think about it. On one hand, as a participant you would be paid to do nothing but drive around on a fake road at a certain speed, which would be awesome. On the other hand, even though it probably would be safer than driving on real roads, there would always be the knowledge that statistically, not all of you are going to make it.

 

[Kitties]

I really do tend to drive the speed limit. However I've been on a certain freeway a few times that isn't well traveled and all times have been in a rental car bigger than my own. And before I even noticed I would be going 85-90. Time to slow down!

I-5 in Northern California is 70mph and that's what I'll drive when I'm on it. That must have been Pickle Juice flying by me.

Probably not the best idea to raise the speed limit in my humble opinion.