| 777 | Date: Thursday, 28 Oct 2010, 16.25 | Message # 1 |
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User ID: 777
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| Good news from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: Highway fatalities fell to their lowest number in 60 years in 2009. Even more telling, the fatality rate fell to its lowest level in history, at 1.13 deaths for every 100 million miles of travel.
Now brace yourself: The same safety agencies that correctly cite improvements in safety technology or seatbelt use will start haranguing Washington about how much safer roads would be if only we stopped more speeders. As ever, take their apocalyptic warnings and crush them beneath your high-speed radials -- preferably at 75 or 80 mph, which is the highway speed that’s eminently safe and sane for any reasonable driver when traffic and weather conditions allow.
The single-year drop in highway fatalities was perhaps most remarkable: 33,808 last year, a nearly 10 percent drop from the year before. Injuries fell to 2.2 million from 2.35 million. Those drops came even as Americans drove 0.2 percent more miles than in 2008. As Dave McCurdy, CEO of the American Association of Automobile Manufacturers, noted, that statistic -- more miles driven, but vastly fewer deaths and injuries -- defied skeptics who suggested that the recession was somehow responsible for declining deaths. And of course, I'll argue that the same goes for speeding; it's a distraction, of course, and dangerous when done by a drunk or an idiot, but it's not the crisis we should be focused on.
"What's really impressive is that during the last 50 years, while the fatality rate has been dropping to this historic low, the number of licensed drivers has more than doubled and annual vehicle-miles traveled have more than quadrupled," McCurdy said. "Vehicle safety technologies, combined with consumer education and tough laws combating the most dangerous driver behaviors, have allowed us to reduce deaths and injuries even with more drivers and more vehicles on the road.”
Today's drivers are less likely to down three martinis before taking the wheel, and they’re certainly more apt to wear seatbelts. But I’m not convinced that, in general, Americans are better drivers than they were 50 years ago. They might be worse, actually, thanks to cell phones and other electronic distractions. So aside from obvious factors such as fewer drunks and more people buckling up, you also have to credit automakers and technology for safer roadways. The toll from rollovers in SUVs has fallen dramatically when you compare deaths in models such as the Ford Explorer before and after they incorporated electronic stability control -- a proven lifesaver -- especially in rollover-prone trucks.
Yet when it comes to the role of speeding, the safety agencies and self-appointed nannies can never admit that they’ve been wrong. When states dared to boost the speed limit from the pathetic 55 mph, even at the risk of losing federal highway funds as a punishment, safety officials declared that bloody mayhem would result. It never happened. Traffic deaths continued to fall even as speed limits were boosted to a common-sense 65 mph, 70 mph or even higher.
In the face of all evidence, the anti-speeding puritans have continued to overstate the danger of higher speeds and demonize drivers who venture above 55. As any good driver knows, the moron who’s determined to drive in the fast lane at 54 mph, oblivious to the cars stacked behind him and forced to pass on the right, creates far more danger than the driver who’s paying attention and cruising at 80 mph when conditions safely allow. And from my own experience, it’s those oblivious lane-blockers driving 10 mph below the flow of traffic, not 10 mph above, who are the ones you reliably see jabbering on their cell phones and thumbing texts as you go shooting past.
And despite the fact that today’s cars can outhandle, outstop and outsafe any car from previous eras -- not to mention protect their occupants far better when you actually do smack into something -- speed limits are no higher, and in many cases lower, than when people drove those rolling death traps of the 1940s and '50s. There's something wrong with that picture. And it sure isn't the rare sight of a 70-mph speed limit sign.
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