Speed Kills. In 2019, 9,478 Americans lost their lives from
speeding, contributing to more than a quarter of all traffic
fatalities in the year. The National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration predicts that speed-related crashes cost the
US more than $40 billion each year. But the emotional toll for
those left behind is immeasurable.
I think we don't really think about this issue. I started
speaking out because it was horrific to bury your child. And
I would not want this to happen to anyone else.
Speed limits were created to avoid situations like what
happened to the Cohens. Yet, millions of Americans continue
to speed every year. Nearly half of all the drivers surveyed have
sped at least 15 miles per hour over the limit on freeways.
A lot of that is just part of our culture, right? We have a
culture of basically driving, you know, sort of trying to
achieve the speed limit as a target rather than a limit. And
maybe even 'Oh, you know, it's fine if I go 10 miles or so by
the speed limit, like nobody's gonna ticket me'.
But some experts argue that the problem goes even further, the
current speed limits might be too unrealistic to have any
impact on how fast people drive on the road,
People drive the way the road is built. That's what happens and
doing anything else in terms of speed limits is just simply
wasting your time.
So just how effective are speed limits in the United States? And
how can they make our roads safer?
Many experts and advocates believe that lowering the speed
limit is effective in saving more lives.
The first thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people think
that speed limits have a linear or sort of like direct
relationship to severity of crashes. In fact, that's just
not true. A person hit by a car traveling at 35 miles per hour
is five times more likely to die than a person hit by a car
traveling at 20 miles per hour.
And that's what happened to my son. He was 12 years old. He was
just trying to get from school to soccer practice. He stopped
off here for a snack. And that was it. I kissed him goodbye
that morning, and I never got to see him alive again. Everyone
can be slightly inconvenienced to save a life.
Studies have also shown a strong correlation between how high the
speed limits are set and how many traffic fatalities are on
the road. Just a five mile per hour increase in the maximum
speed limit led to an 8.5% increase in fatalities on
freeways and a 2.8% increase on other roads. It's believed that
speed limit increases have directly led to more than 36,000
deaths between 1993 and 2017.
And when we seen even a five mile per hour reduction in
speeds in cities like Seattle and Portland, and Boston, we
have seen that there are decreases in the number of
accidents or collisions actually, that are happening on
the streets.
One of those tools, one of those very important tools to
eliminating the bloodshed on our roads is lowering our speed
limits. It's proven to work. I mean, we need to take a data
driven approach and put in place the solutions that save lives.
Speed limits today are usually set by state and local
governments based on their own engineering and traffic surveys.
They can vary quite a bit from state to state, but most of them
are set based on the same method known as the 85th percentile
The 85th percentile is a tool used by traffic engineers to
give them a starting point for setting speed limits. And it's
defined as the speed below which 85% of drivers were already
going on a road. So they go out and they take speed measurements
on the road for a couple of days. And then they say, 'okay,
what speed are 85% of these people going after or below and
that's where we'll start because that's what we think of as what
drivers consider to be a safe speed'.
Despite being the most standard method utilized by traffic
engineers, most states fail to follow the rule by the book. A
2012 report from the Federal Highway Administration
discovered that many agencies often set the speed limit much
lower than the suggested speed. There is also the problem of
conflicting legislation. While Florida's Department of
Transportation claims to support the 85th percentile rule, state
legislatures already established maximum speed limits for varying
roads,
A lot of the policymakers don't actually understand the traffic
engineering of this and so it becomes very politicized. So
what you get is a lot of political pressure and pressure
from communities to say, 'hey, we want a lower number on the
sign'. It makes them feel better but it doesn't actually make the
roadway safer and it doesn't actually change the speed that
of the 85th percentile has also come into question. More recent
studies have discovered there is no evidence that setting the
speed limit at the 85th percentile lead to the lowest
crash rate.
We should be looking at the level of activity on the street,
the types of conflicts on the street, the environment that
you're in, and who's using the street. But essentially, what we
do now is allow drivers to say, 'I want to go as fast as I want
to go and we set the speed limit based on that', including those
who are actually exceeding the existing speed limit.
Basically, it's like saying, if you engage in bad behavior,
we're gonna reward it and let you go even faster. I mean, what
other policy works that way? What other policy says, you
know, do a really crappy job and we'll just make the crappy job
the norm.
Other engineers have also discovered an unexpected flaw.
If you rate the speed limit to the 85th percentile, most people
will stick around that. Now, what we've seen is that 15% that
tends to be above that? When you raise the speed limit, they're
the ones who typically jump up to an even higher speed. And
those are the guys that are causing crashes. So that is the
big problem with the 85th percentile.
Some experts, however, remain skeptical on whether speed
limits have an actual impact on how fast people drive,
There is this mistake, which is this idea that if you lower the
speed limit, you actually are going to get lower speed. That
doesn't actually happen. There's been numerous studies from the
Federal Highway Administration, there was a very extensive
study, probably the best one ever done. And it clearly shows
that there is little to no effect on the actual speeds that
people drive based on the number on the sign.
If research has proven anything, the safety of a road might not
depend on how high or low the speed limits are set but how
much it's based on the way the road is built.
Studies have shown very clearly that drivers choose their speed.
And when I say choose their speed, I mean, they react to
their environment. And so they travel at a speed at which they
feel safe and comfortable based on the design of the road, the
type of vehicle they're traveling in. And also, you
know, the development around that road and what's going on on
the road at that particular moment in time.
Speed limit should be set based on the setting that the road is
located within, rather than sort of, you know, decades of
practice about highway rule setting. So in a typical urban
environment, we should not be thinking, 'Oh, yeah, let's set
our speed limits. Let's start with 55'. And say, 'Should we go
up or down from there?', or even let's start with, you know, some
rule that, again, is based on Highway Research. We actually
should be setting our speed limits in urban areas for urban
settings. And that's just not the way that we do it now.
A better redesign of our roads could also drastically improve
the safety of our roads. We've seen that long straights flat
roads tend to lead to increased speeds, because it just feels so
safe. One thing we can do is make those roads less straight,
build in some curvature to it, in order to sort of force people
to slow down. Another thing they can do to slow you down is
putting speed bumps. And that's slows you down. Because if you
try to go fast over a speed bump, you feel it and it can
even do some damage to your car so you don't do it twice. One
another thing they can do is have fewer lanes, because if
it's a narrow space that you're going through, you tend to feel
less safe and so you slow down. And they can do it by narrowing
the lane, they can do it by giving the appearance that the
lane is narrower by the road markings.
The future of traffic safety lies in how much we care to make
the changes that are needed, and the lawmakers who have the power
to make it happen.
After Sammy was killed, the next 18 months, two other classmates
from his middle school were killed in traffic crashes. I
mean, this is a crisis. We can and we must do better. People do
not have a right to speed on our roadways.
We need to set policy that allows us to make the changes
that need to be made, the physical changes that need to be
made. And that policy needs to be representative of, again, our
goals for sustainability, for equity, for safety, for public
health. And the only way to do that is to knit all of these
components together. We need to have policy that makes sense.