Life is Not a Race, 1st to the Grave Does Not Win

Speed limits, enforcement, speed management, photo radar - all are very emotional topics. I have not brought them up at the holiday dinner table but they likely land in the category of politics, religion, money and family drama. When the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices took up the setting of speed limits earlier this year, it elicited a flood of responses, opinions and perceptions. Why is that?

Is it because virtually everyone has driven over the speed limit at some point in their lives and not been caught so, like in the NBA with traveling we do not expect to be called on it? Is "getting there" of such importance that a few seconds/minutes of travel time justifies the behavior? Is it that we believe the speed limits are not more than suggestions created to try and trap poor unfortunate souls? Do we believe speed limits have no rhyme or reason - consistency - and therefore we act as arbiters to what is appropriate? Is it because we are not in our neighborhood or next to our house that all bets are off as to adherence to speed limits? Do we see on TV constant images of speeding on public streets (even in car advertisements)? Are we such free people that rules made by the kings and queens do not apply to our better judgement? Could the roads we drive be designed in such an incompatible way (wide, straight, flat, open) to the context of their environments that we cannot help ourselves but drive faster than the speed limit? My speeding is ok but yours is not! Given the cultural breadth of speeding there are far more questions that we assume or perceive than answer with facts. Even with the research AAA has done over the years, it only scratches the surface of the "why" question which holds the key to any meaningful solutions.

While we have data associating highway fatalities and serious injuries to speeding to the tune of nearly 10,000 fatalities a year in the USA, even this data provokes many questions of excessive speeding (how do you define this for different highway functions), context of land use/access/design to speeds and actual speed of crashes v. posted speeds. No one can consider 10,000 fatalities and numerous more serious injuries to be something that "just will never change". We are approaching 2020 - we have a decade of hope ahead of us. By partnerships of various organizations toward a common purpose (engineering, enforcement, insurance, judicial, education), funding of safety focused programs, advancements in vehicle technology and innovation in data analytics we, together, can make a difference. Focusing on answering questions with data and facts still has a long way to go to avoid the emotional responses ahead. We will have to fight through the barriers of inertia, tendency to rush to judgement, and "the way things are done"-narrative-driven perceptions that fail to delve into the "why" questions deep enough to understand the complexities of how we got here. Resolve to be open to various perspectives and committed to fact-based research that advances us closer to major reductions in highway fatalities. Shape Your Community.