THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 9, 1996 TAG: 9603090002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
How fast is too fast?
If you're talking about highway speed limits, the debate has been fast and furious recently. But the controversy, in principle, goes back a lot further.
Let's look at the recent ructions first.
Late in 1995 the federal government lifted the nationally imposed limits of 55 mph (urban) and 65 mph (rural), leaving the states free to do their own thing. This is what some states, particularly in the West, region of most long-distance driving, had been pushing for.
However, according to a recent in-depth piece by The Wall Street Journal, the momentum for limit-lifting is not what it was. Even in Montana, which has substituted a vague ``prudent'' speed in daylight for the old federal limits, there is a move to impose specific ceilings again, perhaps 70 and 75.
The arguments rage, pro and con, on how much death and other highway mayhem can be expected from higher limits. But those among the safety lobbyists who fear the worst seem to be making an impression. Just as Virginia has so far rejected a ratcheting upward, so other state officials across the country seem to be having ``second thoughts'' about lifting the limits in force for the past 21 years.
One of the chief reasons for these curbs was fuel economy in a period when concern was higher than it is now (though it still ought to be just as urgent an issue as ever). But the saving of lives became a parallel objective. And the safety people cited by The Journal are pressing harder than ever to persuade states that this in itself justifies keeping the 55 and 65 ceilings, regardless of what the feds have done.
In an odd coincidence (perhaps another of those ``synchronicities'' that seem to haunt me), only a few days before The Journal article appeared, I happened to be reading about car speed limits of a much earlier period. A story that appeared in the Norfolk Landmark (one of this newspaper's predecessors) in 1906 told of a speed-law protest being organized by a group of local ``autoists.''
These car owners, in the process of forming an ``Automobile Association,'' were trying to get the city government to back off from a proposed ordinance that would put a limit of 6 mph on the growing number of motorized vehicles.
One target of the objectors was the proposed provision in the ordinance that would award any amount collected as a fine (up to $20) to the citizen or police officer who brought about the conviction. The protesters could hardly be blamed for resisting this kind of haphazard, informer mechanism.
But, as in the successful erasure of the federal road controls in our own time, speed was the heart of the matter. For the 1906 protest in Norfolk hit hard at the 6 mph limit itself. Statistics had been gathered to show that in almost all large cities, limits had been set higher than scheduled here, with speeds twice as high - 12 mph - being allowed in most such places.
So: Do these two debates over speed limits - separated by 90 years - simply demonstrate once again that the more things change, the more they stay the same?
If you look at it one way, maybe. But not really.
Those 6 mph-12 mph crawls of 1906 just aren't the same kind of issue - in terms of possible highway carnage and other risks, too - as those hurtling velocities of 65-plus that we're dealing with today. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk.
by CNB