Figures don't lie, but liars figure

[unixronin]

Interesting, if brief, reading on highway speed limits from the WSJ:

We now have 10 years of evidence proving that the only "assault" was on the sanctity of the truth.  The nearby table shows that the death, injury and crash rates have fallen sharply since 1995.  Per mile traveled, there were about 5,000 fewer deaths and almost one million fewer injuries in 2005 than in the mid-1990s.  This is all the more remarkable given that a dozen years ago Americans lacked today's distraction of driving while also talking on their cell phones.

(Emphasis mine.)

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I saw an interesting chart some years ago in Car & Driver. It was in an article talking about exactly this. The chart was a plot of annual road fatalities in the US, year by year, with the beginning and end of the 55 limit plotted on it.

It was a very interesting chart, because the trend was so visible. It was basically a straight line, tending downward year by year. Except between the boundaries of the 55 limit, where there was a flat-topped hump. There was a jump in the rate when the 55 limit went in, then it resumed its monotonic decline, parallel to the old line, but a little higher. Then when the 55 limit ended, it fell pretty much back to the old line.

Plotted out that way, that chart all by itself presented a pretty clear argument that far from saving lives, the 55 limit actually cost lives. The bump has been attributed to two main causes. A lesser factor in it is that, with no speed advantage to interstates, people were abandoning the interstates for secondary roads to avoid traffic congestion. But the major factor, as reported by state highway patrols, was "single vehicle accidents due to driver inattention." In other words, out in the big Western states, it was now taking as much as several hours longer to drive from city to city, and drivers were quite simply nodding off at the wheel from sheer boredom and fatigue.

"55. It's not even a good idea. It's just the law."