Oh that Hillary…
Shes yet another politician in a long line of politicians that that has no common sense.

The sad thing is she might very well be the first presidential candiddate Ill be old enough to vote for…

The Lorax, eh.

UNLESS.

I suspect that the best bet for the future is to invest heavily into public transportation and alternate energy sources.

Future?  What future?  If we just cut down these fruit trees, it’s much easier to reach the fruit…

The German Autobahn is safe for a few simple reasons. The roads are engineered for the highest speeds and are maintained meticulously, the cars have been engineered for high speed and crash safety and last but not least, driver education is orders of magnitude ahead of that in the U.S., say. It also helps that Germans have that thing about following rules, like the rules of the road, written and unwritten.

There are tradeoffs between utility and safety and between safety and speed. Given that the American Interstate system is a cheap rip-off of the German Autobahn, there has to be a speed limit. The questions is where.

Returning to energy conservation, it’s again not clear that reducing the legal speed limit isn’t more than a half-assed measure designed to look like something is being done. Penny-wise and pound foolish or whatever the proverb is.

I suspect that the best bet for the future is to invest heavily into public transportation and alternate energy sources. This would piss off tons of lobbyists, so the country will likely come to a grinding halt when the real oil shortages begin and all everybody will look puzzled – “Who could have known? It must be an intelligence failure!”

Sigh.

Zilch: I must say I’m amazed at the resistance here to the idea that there is a tradeoff between speed and safety, which is a simple matter of physics.

That is not the idea to which I take exception, and never did.  I am resisting the idea that speed is the only, or even the most important factor.  And to simplistic approaches generally.  The whole debate has been had here in this country decades ago, and with the same problems of each side talking past the other.

The long and short of it is that nobody disputes that higher speeds carry greater risks – although you haven’t answered how the German Autobahn without general speed limits manages to be safests roads on the planet. What we don’t agree on is whether or not a change in speed limit is “worth it

Zilch, I had a quick glance at the study. There is a lot it doesn’t tell me.

First,the graphics with the yearly stats that I’d really like see are not displayed in the cached page. Obviously, the yearly data might tell a different story than the eight-year averages, with many things not being equal anymore.

Second, I consider neither the change in percentage nor in absolute numbers as significant. Friends and families surviving the unlucky ones may beg to differ, of course.

Questions that the report does not answer (perhaps not unless you actually read it carefully):

What’s the actual change in driving speed before and after? At what speeds did the fatal accidents happen? To what extent do hotspots contribute to the overall numbers? How did the overall traffic volume change? And so on…

We all know that correlation doesn’t imply causation and even the correlation isn’t perfect in the report. We all know that you shouldn’t trust a statistic you haven’t carefully skewed yourself. A more important number to you is not the absolute or relative change in overall fatalities, but how often can you get on the road before the statistical averages are expected to catch up with you. I would bet that the traffic volume has increased over time and it’s again not clear to me whether the risk to an individual driver has increased or decreased in one of the states that raised the speed limit.

The long and short of it is that nobody disputes that higher speeds carry greater risks – although you haven’t answered how the German Autobahn without general speed limits manages to be safests roads on the planet. What we don’t agree on is whether or not a change in speed limit is “worth it” – in the grand scheme of things, all other things NOT being equal.

Sorry for double-dipping, but I just thought of the answer:  Micromanaging occurs at the threshold between two states of compliance.  In the first, a law pisses citizens off every single day of their lives and is never fully accepted.  In the second, they grumble, comply, and eventually think nothing of it.  This is an immutable social rule and governments can only bend it with serously oppressive measures.  So the smart thing to do is to get as much improvement in the situation as you can inside the rule.

Everyone agrees that we need cars, drivers, and roads that are as safe as possible.

Not necessarily.  The philosophy of “If it saves even one life, it will be worth it” is one of my pet peeves.  A few years ago, someone got the bright idea to put a third taillight on cars.  It cut rear-end collisions in HALF without interfering in anyone’s life.  That’s progress.

Where do the fatalities occur?  Could improvements in lane design around on and off-ramps make a difference?  How about differential speed limits for trucks?  (This has been endlessly debated and please let’s not get into it here)  Fact is, in Illinois the truck speed limit is 55mpg and it just gets them down to 70, on a good day.  Why not say, “Weight kills?”  Would it be practical to put a 40,000 lb weight-limit on trucks?  After all, we want the road to be as safe as possible. 

Most people die close to home because that’s where they ARE most of the time.  If a speed-limit law can effect a 10% reduction in highway fatalities but a seat-belt law can effect 35%, which one is a bigger pain in the ass?  Where does micromanaging start?

It’s far from clear to me that a reduction of the speed limits in isolation would result in a significant reduction of highway traffic fatalities and serious injury.

What’s a “significant reduction”?  The report I linked to is probably about as good a controlled study as you’re going to get, because, as you say, all things are never equal.  This is a comparison of five states that increased the speed limit with three that did not.  The conclusion?

For the States that raised their speed limits, every state experienced an increase in the average yearly fatalities. All five states with speed limits higher than 65 mph show an increase in traffic deaths that ranges from seven percent (7%) to thirteen percent (13%).  This study has been run for eight years. In each of these years, the average annual fatalities have been higher since the speed limit increase.

Of course, other factors are important too.  I don’t debate that, and I agree that it’s political suicide to even hint to Americans that they have to slow down.  All I’m saying is that speed kills.  And other things do too- bad drivers, unsafe cars, drunks…  Everyone agrees that we need cars, drivers, and roads that are as safe as possible.  But no one likes to hear that we also have to balance our need for speed with how many traffic fatalities we’re willing to put up with.