Texas raising speed limit to .....

There was a time before Central Government's intervention that most states west of the Mississippi had no speed limit. The rule was 'safe and prudent' during daylight hours.
There were places in the stix in AZ that simply had yellow diamond signs with a big question mark and the word 'Speeding' underneath it.
Nevada, Montana had NO speed limit at all. Remember the scene from 'World's Fastest Indian' where Burt Munroe takes his motorcycle from Bonneville UT to Wendover NV to make speed runs to test aerodynamics? That's not a fabrication, and at that time many guys did that to shake down the cars at speed before wasting a pass on the salt! The NV State Trooper stopped him and said "Just because we don't have a speed limit doesn't mean..." And that's what a lot of the impetus was...

In Montana unless you were seriously over 100, they didn't stop you. And if they did it was more to make sure you weren't in some rattletrap death machine that couldn't stop. I myself passed a MT State Trooper outside Ten Sleeps at 106 (when technically the speed limit was 65) and he didn't even give me the 'Gumball Lightup Slowdown' message. He had more important things to do on a FEBRUARY Saturday afternoon.

It makes a HUGE difference when it can take 4 hours to cross the state, or 8 hours when meddlesome beltway morons (from the Northeast, usually) inflict their speed limit morality on people thousands of miles away with no population density and wide open roads. More people were killed through simple road boredom fatigue than attentive people making a short trip across the state.

Anybody who has been subjected to a drive across Nebraska in June or August will quickly agree there is ABSOLUTELY no reason not to be able to go 110+ and just GET IT OVER WITH! Oglalla to Grand Rapids in about 10.5 hours and that includes 45 minutes stuck in outside Gary waiting to pay my 20 cent toll to leave the stinking festering state of Illinois (money well spent I say, but why do I HAVE to get on a toll road to leave the state???)

The reason for an 85 mph speed limit is today's legislative demeanor. It's graduated. Last session of the part-time legislature they raised it to 80mph in most of West Texas. There hasn't been the carnage predicted. They now decide, 'hey, the namby-pamby naysayers of safety projections of carnage on the roadway hasn't happened, and most everybody is going 85 anyway, lets go ahead and get that monkey off the cops backs and just raise the limit.' And so they did!

People who think 'speed kills' or that speed limits on interstate freeways (like in the range of 55mph) usually come from NY or other Northeast Corridor states where they can't possibly conceive what it's like to drive in the west.

Traffic engineers all agree: set the speed limit at the speed of the 85th percentile of drivers. THAT is the SAFEST speed limit! If that is 100mph, then it's 100 mph. Law enforcement can THEN concentrate not on an arbitrary enforcement of some artificial speed depressing limit (like we have in most places now) but on the REAL problem, the SLOWEST drivers! Stastically speaking the fastest 15% of drivers (those over the 85% limit) cause LESS problems and accidents than the SLOWEST 15% of drivers---those moving roadblocks obstructing flow, parking in the fast-lane... Now that Texas stopped the open container law and closed the drive through liquor stores DUI reductions may allow for a higher speed limit. Frankly before that, I was afraid of drunk Texans weaving through the lanes on the interstate and killing me as much as ending in some Darwinistic Pyre by the arrow-straight roadside where some drunken moron managed to kill himself and all his passengers in some firey anomaly in the middle of nowhere...

But I digress!

If you have a limit, then you can write a ticket based on an arbitrary number. And that makes prosecution a simple matter. To go back to the 'old days' of 'reasonable and prudent'---well that was from a time when PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY was king. They will try 85 for a while, and see if they have an 85th percentile majority. If not, I'd expect to see 90 in 4 years, or that it goes back to 80 where it has been for the past 4 years...

As for 45mph: "Think Metric"

Generally there are 10 or 20Kph bands of speed control worldwide. This is simply because of physics. A 10Kph change is quantifiable in stopping distance and kinetic energy. 80, 100, 120, 140, "Bar Under 200"

In town, 10, 20, or 50kph. Zoos are like 5 or 10Kph... same for 'walking streets' if vehicular traffic is allowed at all.

If you look at it, 50Kph is usually the limit in-town. Thing is, most WESTERN communities (like in SoCal) have WIDE streets--developmental codes in SoCal require street parking, and sufficient room in the lanes for two fire trucks approaching in opposite directions at 50mph to be able to safely pass without slowing...that makes for a 50kph residential speed limit where the houses are directly fronting the streets and kids can walk out into traffic, but on the back sides of the same houses, where no sidewalk exists and there is an 8 foot sound wall that SAME roadway will be posted at 100kph (65mph instead of 25 or 30mph).
OLDER communities with narrower streets have lower limits, rarely above 50KPH. For good reason I suppose. Most of the twisties back east have been speed-reduced from decades of Darwinistic endeavours of local inhabitants. They haven't figured out that rarely speed is the sole contributing factor, or in most cases even mildly contributory. Most of the time they have some idiot who can't drive and FOR HIM driving beyond both his skills and likely impaired. The mass answer is LCD: lower the speed for all, rather than restrict the roads to those qualified to drive on them.

In West Texas, you can literally be blitzed to BAC 2.0 and still keep on the interstate at 55mph...for the most part. I mean between the 'white' lines, not necessarily the 'white and yellow' but confined mainly to the macadam strip. At least from my observation of the LIP (Local Indigenous Persons)...

dumbestone said:

I hope these wide-open "wide-open-throttle" states have some form of annual vehicle inspection for tires and brakes.
Even with 95 mph rated tires I wouldn't want to be running across white-hot asphalt at 85 for long periods after the tires got a little age on them.

So much for 5 mph bumpers.

Click to expand...

Statistically, studies have shown that states with mechanical inspections have absolutely no less more mechanical-related failures than states without safety inspections.

As for 5mph bumpers---not many cars have them these days. The requirement was rescinded to 2.5mph a while ago. And FYI, I've already posted the photos of what happens when a 77 280ZX with REAL 5mph bumpers backends an immobile Dodge Neon with 'modern 2.5mph bumpers' at over 70mph while the Neon is out of gear casuing a somewhat softer impact.

Z was back on-track in less than an hour's time--the Neon? Out of action permanently.

Bumpers have always been ornamental, until the meddlesome 70's when government decided we must be protected from shopping cart damage and the vast majority of parking lot incompetence. We must be saved from ourselves, bigger bumpers!

Texas does have a vehicle inspection program...BTW. Lot of good it does if you have ever seen some of the rolling heaps of crap on the road there with current tags!

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I had no reservation running for all the daylight hours and into the evenings at triple digit speeds, or very near it in my 260Z across SoCal, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Utah, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois or any other number of states. My tires rarely last more than three years. If yours do, consider retiring from sports-car ownership! Rarely do they last more than 20K miles, if that. If you don't want to drive (and not just in a straight line), why buy a performance vehicle? **** my father-in-law was extremely proud his 84 Diesel Chevette kept those Uniroyal Tiger-Paws in great shape for 60K+ miles...

Is the sale of T-Rated tires all that common? And the people that buy them, do they really 1) have cars capable of exceeding the speed rating of the tire, 2) actually drive above the speed on the space-saver spare perpetually on one corner of their car or another?

Most cheap tires are still S-Rated, meaning good to 112mph. I've driven on them for more than 'extended' periods at speed.

And you are wrong about the speed. There is a level where people will not naturally exceed, actually where 85% of the people won't exceed it. And that is where the speed limit should be.

You really have to TRY to go fast in most cars. They just don't "Creep up to speed" much above the 85-90mph range. The occasional attentive driver (not unattentive, attentive as in concentrating on DRIVING and not necessarily SPEED CONTROL) will be able to hold 100mph for some time and never realize anything is amiss with his speed. I woke up one time in a Saab, and simply asked 'Drew, how fast are we going?' He was shocked and let out an expletive and backed off quickly. I could tell waking from a slumber that the nose of the IROC next to us on I55 Southbound was not bobbing and dipping like that at LEGAL speeds. He had gotten into a pace match with this guy and was driving along at 120mph.

Drive like that for several hours, and then actually slow down to the in-city limit through a small town right off the interstate. I swear to christ it's like the world is in reverse and everything takes FOREVER to happen. You become velocitized. The problem is if you never experience it, you never realize it's effects, or the paradigm shift which can happen similarly when you live in a congested place most of your life and never see the open road.

Those are the idiots doing 60 in the passing lane thinking 'it's fast enough for me, it's **** well fast enough for everybody else, too!'