Speed limits curb fuel consumption. Is that President Bush's answer?Speed limits curb fuel consumption. Is that President Bush's answer?Total baloney.
Might have been true with the old big block V8's and older tranny technology.-
Modern cars get the best mileage between 60 and 75.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
PRICE
Won't work.
You never get the SUV drivers to go below 70 mph....
I live in Montana and in Montana there's a lot of dirt between light bulbs... So the NYT can take their 55 MPH and pack it where the sun don't shine... What might work in the Northeast Corridor doesn't fit out here in the Big Sky where a short drive to town often exceeds 100 miles; and that's one way.
Ban Newspapers from printing and delivering their product.
"Print" newspapers on the internet.
Now NYTs if you really want to save wasted fuel you would push this solution!
"driving at 10 miles an hour above the 65 miles-per-hour"
Total BS!
I get my beswt milage btween 75 and 80.
What a lie. Demand for gasoline rose and fell with economic good times and bad time. It rose and fell depending on many foreign events such as the 1978 shortfall and Reagan's deregulation. Leave it to the NYT to say its the 55 speed that takes credit.
It seems like the more we progress, the stupider we get.
The people who propose such nonsense obviously don't spend much time driving across place like Nevada, or need to travel I-5 in California.
When I drive to visit my Mom in SW Idaho, I take I-80 across Nevada to Winnemucca before turning north. I put the car in cruise control, where the limit is 75, and watch the miles clip along.
55 mph adds hours to a trip.
But if history is any guide, there is one thing he could do immediately: bring back the 55 miles-per-hour speed limit.[snip]
For example, driving at 10 miles an hour above the 65 miles-per-hour limit increases fuel consumption by 15 percent;
This is a clever bit of political gambitry by the NYT; if the Bush administration were stupid enough to follow their advice, the backlash of angry US motorists at the ballot box would assure a Democratic victory in the subsequent election.
Now; on to the sophistry of the the final paragraph of the article: they artfully claim a 15% increase in fuel consumption at 75mph compared to 65 (which may, or may not be valid, but that's an issue for another time), in the hopes that the educationally challenged American public will incorrectly assume that DECREASING the speed from 65 to 55mph will produce a 15% DECREASE in consumption. The hidden reality is that at constant highway speeds most of the fuel conspumtion goes into overcoming aerodynamic drag, and aero drag increases with the SQUARE of the velocity! If a 10 mph increase from 65 to 75 produces a 15% increase in consumption, the savings from a similar decrement in speed from 65 to 55 will result in vastly smaller reduction in fuel consumption.
The morons touting this "solution" also fail to comprehend the effect of such a speed limit reduction on economic activity; truck drivers are paid by the hour, not the mile, and to the extent that long-haul trucks reduce their speed, the labor cost component of shipping goes up. Additionally, every additional hour an American worker spends on the road each week is an hour of lost potential economic activity by every one of those workers, with concomitant negative economic consequences.
Lastly, there is a safety issue that no one wants to consider: artificially lowering a speed limit INCREASES the accident rate! Traffic engineers have known for decades that for any road, there is one unique speed limit which produces the minimum accident rate for that road; that speed limit is has been shown to equal what is called the 85th percentile speed -- the speed at which 85% of all vehicles will travel at or below on that road in the absence of any speed limit signage. Anyone who has travelled on US interstates knows that the 85th percentile speed is well above 55 mph, and anyone unfortunate enough to have travelled the nation's interstate sytem under the previous federally mandate 55 mph speed limit will recall just how boring it is (and consequently how inattentive the driver becomes) to travel at that speed, and the margin by which it was ignored by commuters in metro areas (the average was about 75, not yhe mandated 55).
Finally, consider that only about one third of US highway driving miles are driven on highways on which the speed limit is ABOVE 55, IOW, a federally imposed 55 mph speed limit would NOT apply to 2/3's of the miles driven in this country! Whatever energy savings the 55 mph speed limit produced were paltry (in the 2-3% range of total consumption, as I recall), and were more than offset by the unintended adverse economic and safety effects.
In short, the 55 mph speed limit is an idea being floated by authoritarian anal-obsessive assholes who drive trundling, unexciting cars (picture a "Citroen" with a "Save the Whales" bumper sticker) that match their trundling unexciting anal-obsessive personalities, and they won't rest until the can force the rest of America to drive just like they do. And they want the Republicans to get blamed for it!
Dropping speed limits guarantees more cars in transit longer... more traffic jams, etc. Here in NC many of our highways are posted at 70. We go 75-80, and we're at our destination sooner and the roads are clear than if we poked along at 55.
I can't drive 55!
Leave it to the UltraLeftist NYT to reminisce about the Carter years.
Leave it to the UltraLeftist NYT to reminisce about the Carter years.
I'll bet there's not a place in New York City where the speed limit is as high as 55 MPH!
Idiots!
The Slimes wants YOU to conserve while they and the rest of the elites can use all the energy they want.
No 55 limits ever.
New York Slimes publishes a bunch crap.