Sorry. I can't resist!
EagleFlight wrote:
My greatest promblem with this is that of putting Big Brother in control. Most of you are too young to remember when the sped limit on allmost all interstates was 75 and a lot of states, ie: Texas, had no speed limits. Then along came an artificially induced "energy crisis" and everyone got to drive a "safe and envoirmentally sane" 55. Went from being able to travel from Shreveport to Dallas in 2.5 hours to it being about a 4 hr trip if you drove the speed limit.
Hehe. Yes. You have discovered the governments evil plot to, um... uh... make it take longer for people to get places.
I would think for it to be some kind of conspiracy or plot, there would need to be some actual gain to be made somewhere to justify the whole thing. But hey! I don't want to get between someone and their pet theory or anything... ;)
All kidding aside, I remember that as well (remember the commercials with the guy putting the egg on the hood and under the accelerator?). While I wouldn't call it a plot or anything, I do think there's at least a tiny bit of deception involved. The ideal speed to drive for maximized fuel efficiency varies wildly by car type (and engine size, number of cylinders, etc). Back then, 55 may very well have been a good average speed. Today? Hard to say. If you're weaving in and out of traffic and speeding up and slowing down constantly, you're wasting fuel. Better to slow down your high speeds a bit since you're not able to maintain them long enough to make up the fuel cost for the acceleration. However, on long drives where I'm able to maintain a pretty constant speed, I've found that I get my best milage somewhere around 75-80 mph.
So there's some truth to the ideas. I just don't think a national limit is a really practical approach. I also agree that cars today are vastly safer to drive at higher speeds. With my old 71 Duster, you could really feel it when you went over 80 (smoothed out nicely at about 100 though). With my current car, I can cruise at 80-90 and it feels the same as going 60 in the older car. So safety isn't really as much a factor anymore as it used to be.
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I think this has allways been an envoirmentalist driven idea - it has been around since the late 50's, or maybe before. I remember reading something similar in "Popular Mechanics" when I was in High School - and that was a very long time ago.
Not so sure it's environmentally driven. Most environmentalists would argue against cars in general (autodriven or not). They'd want us to remove our highways and replace them with tolleys and bus systems. And those are the moderal environmentalists. Mass transit is the strongest argument from that camp right now (and has been for quite some time).
The driving force for this sort of thing really are the transportation organizations. Cities spend huge amounts of money building freeway infrastructure to support their traffic. The real gain of this sort of system is that you more efficiently utilize the current freeway space. The human factor in driving is what causes the slowness during rush hour. People insisting on needing to get into that spot that's one car farther along removes the holes that other cars need in order to change lanes. The more lanes on a freeway, the more apparent this effect. That's one of the reasons why simply widening existing freeways rapidly generates a point of diminishing returns. As you add lanes, you increase the number of lane changes, which increases the percentage of "gaps" needed between cars. Many larger cities are really feeling this effect.
However, if you put the cars under computer control, the traffic problems during rush hour pretty much vanish. The exact same size freeway system could manage the exact same number of cars during the same time periods, yet maintain a much faster rate of speed.
It's not about slowing folks down. I don't see this being implemented on long stretches of interstate where you can cruise as fast as you want. It's for rush hour traffic where you're lucky to average 20 mph. I think most of us would be willing to give up control of our vehicles when traveling through those areas if it meant that we could get through them in 10 minutes instead of an hour.
Of course, the biggest problem is that you need to find a way to equip cars with the gear. The average person isn't going to want to pay for that. You'll never be able to ensure that everyone has the system installed, and it's working properly. You'd need to build two systems. One for controlled cars and one for non-controlled ones. It would cost a huge amount initially and would almost definatly require some sort of legistlation requireing new cars to have the system in order for it to ever be built. However, I think long term, it's a worthy idea. I'm just not sure if it can be practically built today.