A study conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) provides criticism of rising speed limits throughout the United States, blaming them for the deaths of nearly 37,000 people.
“About 10,000 people a year die in speed-related crashes,” IIHS President David Harkey says. “We can reduce this toll through effective, high-visibility enforcement and traffic engineering measures. Reasonable speed limits also have a crucial role to play, as our new study demonstrates.”
Granted, those deaths are spread across a 25 year period (1993 to 2017) of rising limits, but it’s a bad look no matter the time frame. To date, 41 states have maximum speed limits of 70 mph or higher, and six of those have 80 mph limits. Yet IIHS says for a few minutes of saved travel time, the risk of fatality increases dramatically. Such an announcement comes as a prelude to a forum being hosted by IIHS and the Governors Highway Safety Association later this month.
“Speeding has become almost a forgotten issue in traffic safety discussions, and clearly we’re losing any sense of limits,” Darrin Grondel, chair of GHSA’s Executive Board and director of the Washington Traffic Safety Commission, said. “This gathering is an exceptional opportunity to craft the building blocks of a comprehensive speed management program that we can translate into action to really make a difference in our work of saving lives.”
The two groups want to design a model speed management program based on input from a variety of experts and stakeholders. After all, states are the ones raising limits, but the current basis of their arguments on doing so are often flawed, by IIHS estimation. Many times, they said, lawmakers argue that drivers are already driving faster than the limit, so they should raise the limit, but this in turn merely leads drivers to go even faster, defeating the whole purpose of the thing.
Even a small adjustment in speed limits could generate significantly more death, according to Charles Farmer, IIHS vice president for research and statistical services. A 5 mph increase could increase highway and freeway fatalities by as much as 8 percent.