…with pump prices for gasoline in Central Oregon generally well over $3 bucks a gallon, you have to wonder why State Representative Chuck Burley (R-Bend) decided it was a perfect day to roll out of bed and announce a powerful hunger to see speed limits on Oregon’s rural Interstates and perhaps selected other median-divided roads be raised to 70 mph. He did, though, according to a story in today’s Bend Bulletin that you, too, could read if you wished to pay the subscription fee. Rep. Burley predicates this idea on the fact that cars are “much safer” today and - what the heck - we have a mandatory seat belt law, so why not….

Why not, indeed. The oil companies would love it, given the fact that fuel efficiency for most vehicles drops dramatically as you accelerate beyond roughly 50 mph. Beyond the opportunity to help Big Oil executives drag themselves out of the abject poverty to which they have been subject over the last few years, there are the twin facts of human nature and physics. Owing to the stalwart efforts of Rep. Burley and others in his party, there are way, way fewer State Troopers out there than there were fifteen years ago, and the absence of a police presence to render some sort of meaning to speed limits has resulted in average speed being at least 5 to 10 mph over the posted limit, with the occasional motorist weaving through the traffic maze at 80 or better, just to complicate things nicely. As for physics, while it is true that cars are “safer”, the fact pertains that they have not been designed to depart the asphalt travel-way and roll, flip, or smash into stationary objects at 70 to 80 miles an hour. These are not NASCAR stock cars and we are not fastened into them in 5-point racing harnesses and the forces of collision are not, in a strict sense of physics, linear with a given speed increase. More to the point, just in case that insulated big-wig world that the Representative has been living in has blinded him to the fact, times have been tough in Oregon recently and a good many of those cars that he would like to see flashing down the freeway at 70 or better are not new vehicles and in many cases don’t have the crash safety that he ascribes as a rationale for increased limits…

Now this isn’t to say that, in an otherwise perfect world, I am opposed to increased speed limits. When I first got my driver’s license in the early ‘70’s (before the first Arab oil ebargo shot gas prices up to a ridiculous and unaffordable 70 cents/gallon), the speed on two lane highways in my home of Central Idaho was 70 mph. Except for 12 years in the Portland Metro area and the Willamette Valley, I have lived most of my life in places like John Day and Southern Deschutes County and Central Idaho where the distance between incorporated communities is measured in hours of travel, not miles.  I Get It.  I understand the itch to step it up a thousand rpm or so and just get there, especially in certain stretches of Eastern Oregon that have that same slightly rolling featurelessness for miles and miles and miles. Times are different now, however; there are considerations other than how fast you travel between points A and B, and there is simply more cost and more traffic with more challenges and more risk than there was even five years ago. Raising the speed limit, regardless of whatever the heck Texas wants to do, is an idea that’s past it’s time…unless you work for Exxon….