10 Years: No More 55 mph

An important anniversary in U.S. motoring history passed recently with little fanfare. It was a little over ten years ago, on December 8, 1995, that the National Maximum Speed Limit (NMSL) was repealed. Today we can travel across the country at much higher speeds in safety and comfort without risk of a speeding ticket and the associated higher insurance premiums.

Much of the credit for the repeal of the NMSL has to go to a grassroots organization headquartered near Madison, Wisconsin, called the National Motorists Association (NMA). Their December, 2005, news release tells the tale as well as I can:

The NMSL, a product of the Nixon administration, was implemented in response to the OPEC oil embargo. After the embargo was lifted, a coalition of groups appeared in support of the lower limit as a "life-saving measure." It was because of such arguments that Congress passed legislation making the 55-mph National Maximum Speed Limit permanent in 1975.
The Citizens Coalition for Rational Traffic Laws (CCRTL), which later became the National Motorists Association (NMA), was founded seven years later for the express purpose of repealing the NMSL. As public compliance shrank, Congressional supporters of the NMSL authorized a National Academy of Science study to document the benefits of the national limit. This study radically altered the dynamics of the public's discussion of the limit.
The NMA demanded that costs, as well as benefits, be part of any evaluation of this law. The debate was dragged into the public and political arenas and the support and rationalizations for the 55-mph NMSL started to show serious flaws.
Claims of lives saved were proven largely invalid. The fact that non-compliance was much greater than the government was admitting also came to light. Public opinion began to shift, and it became socially and politically acceptable to at least talk about higher speed limits.
During this discourse, the NMA became the clear primary opponent of the NMSL. Our organization encouraged sympathetic members of Congress to help us undo the damage of 55-mph limit. Ultimately, in 1987, despite predictions of thousands of additional highway fatalities, Congress decided to allow states to raise Interstate and expressway speed limits to 65 mph.
By the early 1990s, these doom and gloom scenarios were proven false. All but a few states had opted to raise their speed limits, while fatality rates declined nationwide. Following this limited victory, the NMA continued to push for a full repeal of the NMSL. Through a little serendipity and a lot of hard work, Congress passed and President Clinton signed legislation that included a provision repealing the NMSL in its entirety.
Again, opponents of the repeal claimed that without a national speed limit fatalities would increase by over 6,000 victims in the first year alone. Instead, many states raised limits to 70 or 75 mph, expanded 65-mph speed limits to other roads, and the number of fatalities actually declined. During the past ten years since that time, the fatality rate has continued to decline, despite higher speed limits and higher driving speeds. This clearly demonstrated that the 22-year-long experiment with an arbitrary national speed limit served no positive purpose. It wasted time, resources, and billions of dollars while neither reducing fuel consumption nor improving highway safety.
(Source: National Motorists Association. www.motorists.org.)

Though "safety" groups gave credit to the NMSL for the reduction in traffic fatalities, there were plenty of other factors that should have really gotten the credit. First and foremost was that people were driving less due to the high cost and limited availability of gasoline in the mid-1970s. Safer cars and safer roads deserved credit, along with ever increasing use of seat belts.

"Speed Kills!" was the phrase used to justify the 55 mph limit to the public. Speed does not kill. It's the quick stop that kills. That quick stop is usually caused by inattention to the serious task of driving and it can happen at any speed.

The Public Safety departments in every state annually issue dire news releases that the number of traffic fatalities is not going down, or have not gone down enough. The news media regurgitates those news releases without so much as a query. True enough the actual number of fatalities remains pretty much the same. What they neglect to report is that there are many more cars on the road and those cars travel many more miles every year. So the truth is that there are far fewer accidents and fatalities when weighed against the number of miles driven.

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety's Office of Traffic Safety annually issues a booklet called "Crash Facts" that analyzes the data recorded in accident reports. Though the DPS continues to refer to the number of traffic fatalities as an "epidemic", their own statistics show that the rate of fatalities is on a steady decline. The true measure is the ratio of fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT). The most recent Crash Facts booklet covers data from 2004 and is available on-line at the OTS web site (http://www.dps.state.mn.us/ots/). Below are a sampling of the number of fatalities and the rate per 100mil VMT from the past 40 years:

Year Number of Fatalities
Fatalities /100 mil VMT 1965 875 5.2 1975 777 3.0 1985 610 1.84 1995 597 1.35 2004 567 1.00

Today's traffic fatality rate is one-fifth what it was just 40 years ago. Most would call that a significant reduction. The DPS apparently does not think it worth mentioning.

The number of fatalities in Minnesota -- and the fatality rate -- continues to drop. The not-yet-official total of highway deaths in 2005 was 552, and the number of fatalities for 2006 to date is lower than the same period in 2005. Progress is being made in the arena of reducing death on state roads.

A simple fact of reality is that most crashes are caused by humans and humans are prone to the occasional error. There will always be traffic fatalities, just as there will always be people who slip and fall in the bathtub, and people who make speling errors in their READER columns. Fortunately the number of fatalities continues to drop and hopefully will continue that downward spiral. But remember to take the doom-and-gloom scenarios of the Department of Public Safety and the State Patrol with plenty of skepticism.