U.S. DOT: No need for speed

The U.S. Department of Transportation continues to accelerate its efforts toward reducing speeding on America’s roadways.

In January, the U.S. Department of Transportation unveiled its National Roadway Safety Strategy to reduce traffic deaths. The plan attacks the problem with a five-pronged approach of safer people, roads, vehicles, speeds, and post-crash care.

The focus on speeding is evident.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued a supplemental advance notice of proposed rulemaking in May that would mandate speed limiters on most commercial motor vehicles. In addition, the National Transportation Safety Board recently called for all new vehicles to be equipped with technology to prevent a driver from exceeding the speed limit.

Then in October, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it was planning to conduct a survey looking at why drivers choose to speed.

“The department believes it is important to prioritize safety and moving individuals at safe speeds over focusing exclusively on the throughput of motor vehicles,” the U.S. DOT wrote in the National Roadway Safety Strategy. “Both exceeding the posted speed limit and driving too fast for conditions are speeding-related crash factors. By this definition, speeding has played a role in more than a quarter of traffic deaths – killing nearly 100,000 people – over the past decade.”

According to the U.S. DOT, there were 10,490 speeding-related deaths in 2020.

National Roadway Safety Strategy

The report listed four key departmental actions to enable safer speeds.

• Update and lead the implementation of a robust, multimodal speed management program through new guides and close partnerships with stakeholders.
• Develop and improve the information available for setting speed limits through proven safety countermeasures and the manual of uniform traffic control devices, providing a range of methodologies depending on the context of the roadway. Clarify the applicability and correct use of key criteria used in setting speed limits such as the 85th percentile. Provide technical assistance to all sizes of communities to determine appropriate speed limit setting, considering external assistance from leading practitioners and research organizations.
• Revise Federal Highway Administration guidance and regulations to take into account the safety of all users by encouraging the setting of context-appropriate speed limits and creating roadways that help to “self-enforce” speed limits. Provide noteworthy practices for re-engineering roads to slow down vehicles rather than relying primarily on enforcement to manage speeding. Promote speed safety cameras as a proven safety countermeasure.
• Make funds available to communities through discretionary grant programs such as the Safe Streets and Roads for All program and through behavioral safety programs to study and pilot automated or enforcement strategies focused on speeding that are designed to ensure their equitable application.

“Setting safer speed limits is a critical tool for reducing crashes and injury, and methods for setting speed limits should be customized to the context of the roadway,” the U.S. DOT wrote. “For situations where temporary conditions may necessitate slower speeds, interventions such as signage that permits variable speed limits and education on driving cautiously in inclement weather can be used to ensure safe driving speeds. Speeding can also be addressed and discouraged through education and enforcement. Automated speed enforcement, if deployed equitably and applied appropriately to roads with the greatest risk of harm due to speeding, can provide significant safety benefits and save lives.”

Speed limiters on trucks

The U.S. DOT’s crackdown on speeding includes a proposal to limit the speed of most commercial motor vehicles. Although the most recent proposal does not include a top speed, 60, 65 and 68 mph have been floated as possibilities in the past.

As part of FMCSA’s justification for the mandate, FMCSA cited 2019 stats indicating that there were nearly 900 fatal crashes involving large trucks in posted speed limits of 70 miles or more.

However, the statistic provides little to no insight into how much a speed limiter mandate would help in these crashes.

The agency doesn’t know the traveling speeds of the large trucks involved in the crashes nor if reducing the speed to one of the proposed top speeds would have prevented the fatality. The agency also said it doesn’t know how many trucks were already speed-limited.

The statistic fails to show justification for such a significant mandate without knowing how fast the trucks and cars were going in these crashes.

To that point, 1,448 large-truck-related fatal crashes in 2019 occurred in areas with speed limits of 50 and 55 mph. Again, the statistic sheds no light on the benefits of a speed limiter mandate without knowing the traveling speeds.

And limiting a truck to 60 mph, even though there are U.S. speed limits as high as 80 and 85 mph, would create significant speed differentials on the highways.

OOIDA adamantly opposes any efforts to mandate speed limiters on trucks.

Speeding survey

NHTSA plans to survey 1,500 licensed drivers regarding speeding.

The voluntary survey would coordinate with the Washington Traffic Safety Commission and the Washington Department of Licensing to question adult drivers in the state who received at least one speeding conviction in the past three years, as well as drivers not convicted of speeding in the same time frame.

According to the notice, the survey would include general and speeding-specific questions about moral reasoning and legal reasoning, as well as attitudes and perceptions of laws, enforcement and sanctions. NHTSA did not indicate in the notice why it would limit the survey to drivers in the state of Washington.

“The results of this research will assist NHTSA in better understanding how to develop successful programs to improve driver safety,” the agency wrote in the notice. LL