Slowing down the speeders? It’s easy to do, whenever we’re truly ready
Question: How do we get semis to slow down on the freeway? I was going 69 mph on the freeway and one passed me.
Answer: I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you were in a 70-mph zone when this happened because I want to believe the best of the people who send me questions. But at the same time, I’m not entirely confident that I’m right, because I’ve had a number (not too big a number, but a big enough number) of people admit to me that they’re speeding while asking what’s going to be done to stop the people speeding even faster.
It brings to mind the quote by George Carlin: “Anyone that’s driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac.”
We already have police enforcing traffic laws. And that does work. Maybe not to the extent that we’d like it to, but traffic enforcement does change driver behavior and reduce crashes. And commercial drivers face steeper consequences if they do get caught speeding. However, I don’t think we can expect officers writing tickets to solve the problem on their own. Washington has about 167,000 miles of road and a little over 10,000 state and local law enforcement officers. Even if we asked every one of them to focus on traffic enforcement (completely unrealistic) and asked them to work every day for 24 hours a day (completely impossible) we’d still have many miles of unpatrolled roads.
Last year there were 524 traffic fatalities in Washington, and almost a third of them involved speeding. After several decades of decreasing fatalities, we’ve stagnated in our progress. The things we did to move us from 744 fatalities in 1985 to our low of 436 fatalities in 2013 might not work to move us toward the ultimate goal of zero fatalities.
We could do more, and while you asked specifically about commercial vehicles, these options would apply just as well to all of us who drive. I’ll offer a couple of them, which you may or may not like. I’ll point out that liking or not liking a particular law or enforcement strategy is a separate matter from its effectiveness.
Automated enforcement (also known as photo radar): Many European countries have used photo radar to reduce speeding and crashes, but for some reason a lot of Americans think European results won’t translate here in the U.S. Maybe we’re still subconsciously holding on to the revolution. So I’ll use the example of Australia. After implementing automated enforcement, they found that fatalities fell by 87% and crashes decreased by 38% in areas with speed cameras. Washington has authorized speed cameras, but presently limits them to school zones.
Speed limiting: The technology to limit the speed of a vehicle has been around for a while, and some commercial vehicle companies use them to manage their fleets. If we really wanted to stop speeding we could do it without enforcement just by making it impossible for vehicles to speed. You know when you look at your GPS and your speed switches from black to red because you’ve exceeded the speed limit for that location? It wouldn’t take much more to limit your car from reaching that speed in the first place. Two years from now that’ll be the law for all new cars in Europe.
How do we get drivers (both commercial and the rest of us) to stop speeding? We have to have the will to enact the strategies that have been proven to work. I think the question then becomes, “Are we ready?”
This story was originally published December 21, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Slowing down the speeders? It’s easy to do, whenever we’re truly ready."
