GET THE LEAD OUT

2 Fast 4 Safety? (WALTER KIRN, July 13, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

Out on the long, lonely highways of the West, the mythical backdrops for countless car commercials and millions of summer family vacations, the speed limits make criminals of everyone -- minor revolutionaries, even. Up ahead, nothing but sky and flattened jack rabbits. In the rearview mirror, ditto. How many more hours to Yellowstone National Park? With only the road signs themselves for landmarks, there's often no way to judge. And so, to convince himself that he's making progress, Dad kicks it up to 80, 85, and then -- as the kids start whining for a bathroom break -- to a solid 90; 90 feels right. Sure, it's against the law, but what's the law, particularly to an American with a V-8, an empty cooler and a full bladder? The law is a nag. The law is petty, irrelevant. Speed kills -- of course it does. But slowness tortures, particularly when the next town on the map (which may or may not turn out to be a town, in the sense of having a gas station or a store) is exactly 216 miles away.

For anyone who has ever undergone such Western automotive agonies and reacted by putting human law aside and heeding natural law instead (Thou Shalt Reach Old Faithful Before Dark), no news could be more intriguing than the following: according to a recent academic study, raising speed limits to 70 miles per hour, and even higher, has no effect whatsoever on the death rates of young and middle-aged male drivers. That's right, guys: if you're under 65 and you find yourself cruising the great wasteland somewhere between Denver and Portland, say, you can rev things up with a clear conscience -- soon maybe even in Oregon, whose Legislature is considering upping its maximum speed limit from a poky, painful 65 to a brisk and wholesome 70.

Like most studies that seem to grant us leave to indulge our lazy, bad habits, this one comes with an asterisk, unfortunately, that it would be cruel not to disclose (despite the fact that as a young male Westerner I'd love to bury the finding in a footnote): higher speed limits do increase the death rates of women and the elderly.

Why not have different speed limits, or even lanes, for them and us? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 12, 2003 9:34 AM