Speeders Highlight a Big Tail Chase
I was listening to Good Morning America this morning and it seems cities around the country are having a hard time controlling speeding drivers. Follow along here. Scottsdale, AZ was the first city to have speed enforcement cameras on one of its highways. Other cities are following suit. A county in Maryland that has speed cameras simply sends a citation to the speeder in the mail if they are clocked at more than 11 mph over the limit. Eleven miles over is a far cry from one driver that was caught doing 131 mph past a 65 mph sign. This camera system has its detractors that claim the cameras aren’t always accurate and they are limited. But the cameras work.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety knows that Americans speed and on all types of roads. The speed cameras have got the 75 mph crowd way down from 15 percent to less than 2. That’s quite a drop. But why do we speed? Because we can. And most of the time we do it around 20 percent over the limit. We should be asking why during this oil crunch and with CO2 emission overload hasn’t our federal government lowered the speed limit to 55 mph like it did in the 70’s?
The idea of speeding because we can is bolstered by our car industry. Don’t get me wrong; it’s sheer joy to hear pistons slamming while jumping out in front of the guy that wasn’t going to let me on the expressway. But that’s about it. Keep traveling too fast and get caught, not to mention burning way too much gas and emitting excessive CO2 in the process. We should wonder about the contradiction of producing speedy cars in a country of speed limits. It’s stupid irony.
Lowered speed limits and the introduction of ethanol pumps, something I have yet to see anywhere, were the combination of choice in the 70’s when gas was high. I don’t think ethanol is the best idea, it will burden the space for food crops and give us another empire that is corn rich, but among alternative choices, it has its place. So where are the ethanol pumps? Are they gone the way of a lower speed limit?
Some of the excuses look extremely flimsy for all the things we do and don’t. If we had ethanol pumps back in the 70’s, than we should most surely be able to get them out there now and fast. It isn’t like we don’t have the technology. Ditto for lowering the speed limit. As for car manufacturers, Daimler-Chrysler (at the time) had the technology to produce hydrogen buses for Iceland 5 years ago but “nada” for us now. Ford and GM are slow to present true hybrids and keep lobbying on fuel economy issues. They claim they need time to produce 40-mpg cars. But back in 1984, the Big 3 automakers produced a total of 35 cars that got 40 mpg or more. GM had 19, Ford had 6, and Chrysler had 10 of those gas savers. I say drag out those engineering plans and slap a new, sleek, light weight body on those babies and get em out there! My girlfriend who is in the market for a hybrid came back from the auto show disappointed and a little unnerved by the propaganda she heard like, “this is a REAL car,” because it goes too fast for the speed limits and burns mega petro.
Have you followed the logic and gathered a clear idea that nothing adds up here? We chase our tail—backwards! The experience and technology is there, so we have to look to the reason it’s not happening. There is only one industry that benefits from speeders, inefficient fuel economy, and no alternative fuel sources readily available—OIL.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4221537
http://www.mpgomatic.com/2007/10/19/super-cheap-high-mpg-cars-1984/