THEY SAY SPEED KILLS

We must consider the possibility that the federal, state, and local emphasis on driving the speed limit instead of relying on personal judgment will logically produce at least a few drivers who do exactly that. How many crashes happen to drivers complying with the speed limit yet proceeding too fast for conditions at that particular moment? Since FARS is unable to answer this question, we've searched elsewhere and found one state, Texas, that tracks those components separately. In 1994, for all accidents in that state, "too fast for conditions"--failure of judgment, in other words--outnumbers "over the limit" by 10 to 1. For fatal crashes, the two are about equal, with "over the limit" having a slightly greater share at 52 percent. This breakdown has been consistent over the five years we checked.

Body Count No. 4
What NHTSA says: "After the NMSL [55-mph national maximum speed limit] was amended in 1987 to allow 65-mph speed limits on rural interstates, fatalities on rural interstates in those states that increased speed limits were 30 percent higher than expected." Source: NHTSA State Legislative Fact Sheet	The facts: It's unclear here who was doing the expecting and what increase in fatalities they expected in states that kept the 55. In any case, fatalities also increased on the rural interates that didn't raise the speed limit in 1987, up 8 percent. Sources: FARS; Federal Highway Administration

Let's assume Texas is typical of the nation for a moment. If we take this 52-percent share and apply it to the 3.3 percent of fatals nationwide that FARS says are related only to speed and no other factor, we would conclude that 1.7 percent of fatal crashes are related only to speed over the limit. So far, we think NHTSA's case against speed and speeding is weak.

Do other safety advocates have a better case? We asked the National Safety Council. It had no information other than the table referred to earlier in this article.

What about the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS)? President Brian O'Neill's office seemed surprisingly uninterested in the question, but senior vice-president Allan F. Williams did forward to us a NHTSA technical paper, Data Analysis of the Speed-Related Crash Issue, by Noble Bowie and Marie Walz of NHTSA. Although published in 1994, the paper is nearly identical to a work presented by the same authors at a safety conference in Paris in 1991. It relies on old sources. The main ones, dating back to 1986 and to 1979, estimate speed-related crashes to be about 12 percent of total crashes. Yet the authors confidently assert that "in 1989, approximately one-third of all fatal crashes were speed related." The source? FARS.

In the February 3, 1996, issue of its newsletter, Status Report, in an article lamenting the end of the national maximum speed limit, IIHS said, "Now additional motorists will die because of higher travel speeds." It went on to say: "In the 40 states where speed limits were raised to 65 mph during 1987­88, deaths on rural interstates were 24 percent higher in 1993, compared with the average on the same roads during 1982­86. Meanwhile, deaths on urban interstates in the same 40 states were 5 percent lower in 1993 compared with 1982­86. The institute estimates about 400 lives have been lost each year because of higher speed limits."

Clearly, the assertion is that higher speeds on rural interstates cause more deaths. But the data selected in support of this claim are curious. Why not make the obvious comparison? Look purely at rural interstates, since the speed-limit change was confined to that class of road, and then compare states that raised speed limits with states that didn't. And why not talk about fatality rates (fatalities per miles driven) rather than fatalities alone?

Probably because such a comparison would tell a different story. And it does. For the group of states that raised their limits in the 1987­88 period, the number of fatalities has increased quite dramatically on rural interstates, but the miles driven have increased even more. So the fatality rate shows a downward trend, as it does for states that did not raise the limit.

Charles Lave and Patrick Elias of the University of California, Irvine, offer an explanation for this increase in miles driven on rural interstates. They argue that raising the limit may have saved lives in the group of raising states because it attracted drivers to safer roads, to interstates from local rural roads that have a much higher fatality rate. In those states, we find that the share of rural travel being done on interstates has risen from 21.2 percent in 1982 to 24.4 percent in 1994. This gain far outstrips the gain of rural interstates in states that did not raise the limit.

Body Count No. 5

What NHTSA says: "Passenger cars and light trucks use approximately 50 percent more fuel traveling at 75 mph than they do at 55 mph." Source: NHTSA State Legislative Fact Sheet

The facts:As speed was increased from 55 to 75 mph, the fuel-economy decrease ranged from 17 to 25 percent, depending on the vehicle, in a test of a group of 1996 cars and light trucks. Even at 75 mph, highway mileage is better than city mileage. Source: Chrysler Corporation

To those who would suggest that the speed limit is the only difference between the Nebraska-Kansas-Oklahoma-etc. group of raising states and the Pennsylvania-Maryland-Delaware-etc. group that did not raise, we'd point out that, back in 1982, when all states had the same limit, the raisers had an average fatality rate of 1.5 deaths per hundred million miles driven compared with 1.1 for the group of keepers (we use 1982 here because IIHS begins its assertions with that year). With this history in mind, finding that the group of raisers still has a higher fatality rate than the group of keepers is hardly surprising, and it shouldn't be used as an indictment of the speed-limit change.

Watch out for those who cherry-pick through the numbers to find one that proves their case. For example, many have noticed the 19-percent increase in the rural-interstate fatalities for the group of raisers in 1987, and held that up as proof that speed kills. What they didn't mention is that fatalities also bumped up--by 7 percent--in the group that kept the 55. Besides, without factoring in the increased share of driving on rural interstates, these figures are meaningless.

At the same time IIHS was telling the public (in Status Report) about rising deaths due to speed, it quietly released a statistical analysis by Charles M. Farmer that said, for the 1975­95 period: 1) "The long-term trend toward decreases in motor-vehicle fatalities does not seem to have changed"; 2) Short-term increases in the trend beginning in 1984, 1986, and 1993 were reliably predicted by changes in miles driven and by changes in unemployment. The trend starting in 1986 is exactly the one Status Report blames on the speed-limit changes.

At this point, we conclude that neither the National Safety Council nor the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety nor NHTSA has made a persuasive case against speed. Remember what NHTSA's own documents say about related factors: "These are not causes of the accident."

We are not arguing that speed adds no risk to motoring. Higher speeds do add risk. If you run into something, your chances of injury and death rise sharply with increasing speed. This is a fact of physics. The real question is, Do modestly higher speeds--speeds within the envelope that a majority of motorists would choose for themselves--increase the likelihood of collision?

Every piece of data we can find suggests that such speeds are a minor contributor to crashes compared with other factors such as plain old inattention and failure of judgment. There is another good reason to think this. Contrary to the "facts" published by NHTSA in its state-legislative fact sheet, the fatality rate on the German autobahn matches that of the U.S. interstate system within a few percentage points each year and has done so since 1984. In these days of highway congestion, speed is no longer unlimited everywhere on the autobahn. But based on the observations of C/D staffers and others who drive there often, it remains unlimited on perhaps 30 percent of the system. If speed kills, why isn't it killing on the autobahn?

Sounds like a good research topic for NHTSA, doesn't it? U.S. safety advocates are quick to pooh-pooh this idea, saying Germany and Germans are different. They have tough licensing requirements; they obediently buckle up; their slower traffic invariably moves out of the way of faster cars.

Sounds like the Germans have already found the key to safe, high-speed transportation while our NHTSA is cooking up body counts to prove that it can't be done.

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