Texas Opens Fastest US Highway With 85 MPH Limit 992
Hugh Pickens writes "Most highways in the U.S. top out at 75 mph, while some highways in rural West Texas and Utah have 80 mph speed limits. All that is about to change as Texas opens a stretch of highway with the highest speed limit in the country, giving eager drivers a chance to rip through a trip between two of the state's largest metropolitan areas at 85 mph for a 41-mile toll road between Austin and San Antonio. While some drivers will want to test their horsepower and radar detectors, others are asking if safety is taking a backseat. A 2009 report in the American Journal of Public Health found that more than 12,500 deaths were attributable to increases in speed limits on all kinds of roads and that rural highways showed a 9.1 percent increase in fatalities on roads where speed limits were raised. 'If you're looking at an 85 mph speed limit, we could possibly see drivers going 95 up to 100 miles per hour,' says Sandra Helin, president of the Southwestern Insurance Information Service. 'When you get to those speeds, your accidents are going to be a lot worse. You're going to have a lot more fatalities.'"
Nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
Hate to break it to Sandra, but that's the usual speed in many parts of Texas.
Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
Hate to break it to Sandra, but that's the usual speed in many parts of Texas.
As well as Wyoming, only state where I have been passed while going over 100mph.
Re:Rest of the world already ahead (Score:5, Informative)
And autobahn is one of the safest highways as well:
http://www.ehow.com/about_6726960_autobahn-safety-vs_-interstate-safety.html [ehow.com]
Re:Net actual speed (Score:4, Informative)
You don't have to pull over. It has cameras that check your toll tag on your car or snaps your license plate to charge you for the trip. Any modern tollroad is like this. They do have places to pull over if you want to pay in cash but it's not required. You can blas up 45 miles from Austin to Georgetown currently without ever stopping.
In metric (for the rest of the world) (Score:4, Informative)
For those of us who don't know mph, here's some conversions to km/h:
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+85+mph+in+kph [google.com] (etc)
100mph =~ 160.934km/h (by definition)
95mph =~ 152.9
90mph =~ 144.8km/h
85mph = ~136.8km/h (motorways in Italy, among other countries, have speed limits of 130km/h)
80mph =~ 128.7km/h
75mph =~ 128.7km/h
74.5mph =~ 120km/h (this is the motorway speed limit in Ireland)
70mph =~ 112.65 km/h (this is the motorway speed limit in the UK)
I drive that road regularly (Score:5, Informative)
- This road is where there is a lot of flat land. Even at 85 you can see where you will be in a few minutes (and virtually not take a turn until you get there). You can also see any animals that may enter this road, but it's mostly a bridge anyway which avoids that.
- There's nothing to see on this road. No billboards or distractions. No gas stations, restaurants, few farm houses. Few exits.
- The road has heavy steel guard rails that would stop most anything driving along it. These rails are after over a car lane of margin. A few places don't where it's just flatland for 1000s of feet.
- The state-standard noisy edge-of-the-road keeps drivers from hitting the road's guard rails.
- If I drove you on it blindfolded (in a car whose engine noise doesn't give away the speed like mine does), you'd think we were driving - Very light traffic. No old cars
- The biggest risk was just getting bored, & speed helps this.
Re:Rest of the world already ahead (Score:2, Informative)
Training is socialistic, isn't it?
That is why Americans don't do that.
Re:Nothing new (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
And...
1: it's a toll road, which reduces traffic from the start
2: it's a toll road, so there are fewer entrances and exits
3: it's RFID toll tag or pay-by-mail (using license plate recognition cameras) ONLY, and existing toll booths on the north half will be removed, further reducing obstacles
4: not only is it a divided highway (or "dual carriageway" as they say on the other side of the pond), but
5: it's being built with a concrete surface, not asphalt (all the toll roads around Austin have been concrete) so you won't have potholes
6: it completely bypasses the Austin metro area and the overloaded San Antonio to Austin I-35 route, even avoiding small towns (part of the point, since this would have been the route for the now-defunct TTC project)
Even on the overloaded San Antonio to Austin section of I-35, traffic often goes 75-85mph when traffic is light.
Re:Rest of the world already ahead (Score:4, Informative)
" take lame driving "test" where you drive a couple laps around the city square or a big empty parking lot, then parallel park"
Which shithole place does your licensing? Memphis, TN DMV forced us to demonstrate we could operate on both highway and local streets when I got my license almost ten years ago.
Re:There's nothing Darwin about it. (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest difference is the time travelled during the reaction time.
In 1.5s (standard reaction time), a car travelling at 85miles/hour travels 10 metres further than one travelling at 70miles/hour.
Once the brakes are applied, perhaps to avoid an obstacle, the car travelling at 85miles/hour will be travelling significantly faster than the 70miles/hour one when it hits the obstacle -- braking isn't linear, and the difference between hitting the obstacle at 5mph and, say, 40mph can be fatal)
Re:There's nothing Darwin about it. (Score:1, Informative)
That's because American cars are crap when it comes to safety.
Nonsense.
Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
Well I drive on this road all the time, it's practically deserted because the locals, who refused to fund it with taxes (red state - taxes are just for crack mothers and layabouts, not for roads and shit), are in some sort of quasi-rebellion against the overseas interest who owns the road and put the toll system in place. 85 feels very slow, just the comparatively short run between the Austin airport and round rock feels like you're in the middle of nowhere and may not even see a car much less pass one. Only complete pussies ever drove below 80 on this road, even when the speed limit was 65. Now I expect to see 90-95, but with the exception below, it's straight, wide and open. There isn't a much safer place to go fast that close to a major city.
Unfortunately as all the toll road speed limits have gone up, more and more people are out seemingly in protest, driving side by side way lower than the speed limit. We don't have a right lane for passing only law here, so you're stuck with them. So it may be 85 mph, but in practice you're stuck with the slowest person on the road.
Re:There's nothing Darwin about it. (Score:5, Informative)
A car going past you at 120mph is not going to give you nearly as much turbulence as overtaking a truck doing 60mph. In fact one of the reasons a fast car can go 120mph is because it doesn't cause a lot of turbulence. It can be a bit of a shock to be overtaken by someone going 150mph, when you are already going 100mph in Germany, but beyond the surprise it is not affecting you.
Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
Research indicates that this is not the case. In areas where speed limits are not enforced, civil engineers find that 85% of motorists drive at what most would call a prudent speed. In fact, in many municipalities, speed limits for a given road are determined by observing traffic and determining the limit based on the 85 percentile speed (assuming, of course, that generating revenue from speeding fines is not part of the equation). Google "85 percentile traffic speed" if you're interested.
Re:Yeah but... (Score:4, Informative)
Like anything else, the stupid and unskilled will kill themselves off, leaving behind a stronger more fit population capable of handling such conditions. .
That's the most idiotic thing to be said on the topic. The stupid and the unskilled will end up killing other people who were doing just fine.
Re:Autobahn (Score:5, Informative)
Going a safe speed is the most important thing, I applaud you for that, but there are a couple of other relevant facts:
1) Impeding the flow of traffic is illegal.
2) Driving in the passing lane without passing is also illegal.
3) Your speedometer may not match those of other drivers. They may be "going the speed limit" as well.
I've heard this argument many times, and people need to remember there are more laws than the speed limit that govern how you should drive, especially what lane you should be in. Respecting the posted speed limit is good, but so is respecting all those signs that say "slow traffic keep right." If your aim is to follow the law, follow ALL of them. And probably don't assume people going faster are jerks. Speedometers can vary quite a bit. See Car and Driver [caranddriver.com]'s feature on the topic.
Re:Apples and Oranges (Score:5, Informative)
Still done that way today. I occasionally take SH 79 back and forth between Austin and Hearne, which is a 65mph road with one lane in each direction for the vast majority of it. Even when the difference in speed is minimal, a large percentage of drivers will use the shoulder as a "get out of the way" lane to allow someone to pass if they're unable to get around on their own due to oncoming traffic. There have only been a small handful of times that I haven't seen that happen, and even then, those drivers were still going at least the speed limit.
Texas drivers still don't honk at each other either. I've seen people sit through two full cycles of a stop light without honking at the car at the front of the line that for some reason didn't go either time. Having grown up in south Florida, which has a very northeastern U.S. culture due to all the snowbirds down there (i.e. honking is a way of expressing the fact that the light is almost green and you haven't started rolling forward yet) , it continues to boggle my mind.
Re:There's nothing Darwin about it. (Score:4, Informative)
So really the insurance companies are just managing how many accidents are going to cause damage that's over the deductible.
Re:Yeah but... (Score:5, Informative)
People refuse to obey the speed limits because the speed limits are retarded. Take any major highway in North America and you'll find massive stretches of more or less completely straight road where there's no reason you couldn't drive all day at your car's top speed, except, the posted speed limit is a third (or less) of said top speed.
This will never change because the government strongly prefers to keep everyone a criminal, they're much easier to control that way. If speed limits were strictly enforced (and not increased to sane values), there would be riots in the streets.
The science behind the building of the Autobahn lead to frequent bends in American highways. Ever notice they go a few miles, then suddenly veer a few degrees, then a stretch and veer back? It's to keep you alert because driving, at any speed, is metally fatiguing, moreso at night.
Not unusual to see in the news someone fell asleep while driving and rolled a few times. The faster you are going when you roll the less likely you are going to be in a happy alive state when coming to rest.
Speed limits also are well thought out as the average driver does not possess the skills of Mario Andretti, they're more along the lines of Ma and Pa Kettle. If your reaction time is poor at 65 MPH, going faster isn't going to help anything.
Re:There's nothing Darwin about it. (Score:5, Informative)
I've read about a hundred papers on auto collisions and talked to a couple of dozen auto safety engineers to make sure I understood what I was reading. The fatality rates of automobile collisions increase by about a square function of the speed. When you have a collision, you have a lot of energy to dissipate, and KE = 1/2 mv^2.
I don't have my files around to cite, and I've forgotten most of my college physics, but here's the bottom line (Fermi exercise; the numbers may not be right, but if you have better numbers you can recalculate it for me):
1. According to a presentation on front-end collisions I read in Automotive News by a Mercedes-Benz engineer, it's impossible to make a car that will keep you alive in a front-end collision into a rigid barrier at more than about 50 or 55mph.
A car crashes into a barrier. The occupants are restrained by their seat belts. The front end of the car crushes until the car comes to a stop. The front end, from bumper to firewall, is about 50 inches. The maximum deceleration the occupant can survive is 50g. When you run the numbers, the initial speed is about 50mph. With those parameters, the front end of the car is completely crushed, up to the firewall, and the passenger compartment is intact. Above that speed, the engine goes into the passenger compartment, the passenger compartment crushes and collapses, and the collision usually isn't survivable.
The engineer said that you can't raise the survivable speed significantly, because the front end would have to be impractically long (that 50 inches would increase as the square of the speed).
There might be somebody out there who drove into a brick wall at 65mph and lived. This is an idealized model, and specific circumstances can affect it.
But that's the physics of most head-on collisions, and it's been confirmed in collision labs and in accident investigations on the road.
In fact, most people don't survive a head-on collision at >55mph, as this classic study http://papers.sae.org/670925/ [sae.org] by Nils Bohlin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Bohlin [wikipedia.org] found out. Great read, BTW (if you're a physics/engineering nerd).
2. OK, so not all collisions are head-on into a barrier. Let's assume that Texas road is designed well enough to avoid that. Let's assume it's lined on the sides with breakaway signs, popcorn-filled barriers and right-of-ways filled with sand.
You've got people driving along at 85mph. For a certain number of those cars, something will go wrong. Maybe a tire will blow. Maybe one car will bump another. Maybe a wheel won't be aligned right. (I've seen wheels fall off.) There will be a lot of human failures, like drivers falling asleep, or failing to pay attention,
Once you have the initial disruption, a car at 85mph (vs. 55mph) (a) is much less stable, and much harder to get back under control and (b) has a lot more energy to dissipate before it comes to a stop.
Maybe you'll be lucky and slide to a stop along the pavement, but the physics is against it. If you don't crash against a barrier, that energy tends to convert to rolling energy.
The tendency is to roll, along a couple of axes. First you roll across the horizontal plane, until the car is perpendicular to the direction of travel. Then the car flips over, and usually rolls until it stops. Rollover accidents are the most fatal. Racing cars are built with reinforced tops and rollover bars that can take a rollover, but when I was studying this stuff, the roofs of passenger cars usually collapsed after one or two rollovers, and even if they didn't collapse, the occupants got a lot of damage.
So you're going to roll over a lot more violently, and a lot farther, at 85mph than you would at 60mph.
Whether a driver should risk his life and brain by driving >85mph is a question that physics can't answer. But the death rate goes up pretty fast above 55mph.
As my physics professor used to say, I don't care if you kill yourself, as long as you get the physics right.
Re:There's nothing Darwin about it. (Score:4, Informative)
most of us are driving 70-80mph anyways when the limits are 55-65mph...and arbitrarily enforced. Why not just make the limits 85mph...
The safety freaks will say people will start going 95-105mph if you raise the speed limit to 85, and people listen to them.
I recently came back from a trip to Slovenia.
We did a lot of driving on the highways there and what I noticed is that even though the posted speed limit was 130Km/h (about 80mph), most people drove slower than that.
Compare that to Ontario, where the speed limit is 100Km/h and the traffic usually flows at about 120Km/h if there are no obstructions.