Very well put Chip. Too many people are overly-anxious to demand laws to fix what ought to be dealt with using common sense and/or market/social forces. Very often, laws are enacted to affect change for things which are changing anyway (say, in response to voter 'demand for action'). This can often lead to a backlash, as the results tend to swing too far in the desired direction. This is because the legislators are simply implimenting what is often happening on its own. Thus, we spend half our time legislating what 'ought to be the law,' and the other half trying to figgure out how to effectively rein-in the results of those laws.
On the topic of speed limits specifically: Many cars now are actually more efficient at 65 MPH than they are at 55 MPH (due to gearing, aerodynamics, better tyres, etc). The other thing to consider when thinking about speed limits is time savings, and how that can affect accident rates. Many studies have shown that accident rates have decreased with the higher speed on US highways. This seems to be because drivers do not have to spend nearly as much time monitoring the speedometer, and they can relax more- simply driving at a speed that is comfortable. This leads to less fatigue, and therefore fewer accidents. Cleaning up accidents takes a significant amount of time and resources, and building new cars to replace crashed ones uses even more. Therefore, I put forward the idea that leaving the speed limits where they are will ultimately use less fuel than reducing the speed limits will. If petrol gets expensive enough, people will naturally begin to demand higher efficiency from their cars, and drive at the most efficient speed for their particular car. The most notable result of the 55 MPH speed limit was not actually fuel savings, but rather massive revenue gains for the Highway Patrol. Cheers, Josh ----- Original Message ---- From: Chip Mefford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Sent: Friday, 25 April, 2008 2:46:30 AM Subject: Re: [Biofuel] We Need To Solve The Oil Crisis--Now Brian Schneider wrote: > Hello, > Just a comment, why don't we in the US do something else that was > done in the 70's oil crisis...drop the speed limit back to 55. There were a *lot* of problems with this. I'm not going to go into it all, in fact, I'm barely going to scratch the surface. But essentially, the nationwide 55mph speed limit was about as popular as prohibition, and caused many of the same problems. In interest of full disclosure, when ever I hear 'There ought to be a law", I duck. We have plenty of laws. a few orders of magnitude too many I'd say. In fact, I'd point to the current state of affairs as my primary exhibit in the 'laws don't fix anything' presentation. _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ Get the name you always wanted with the new y7mail email address. www.yahoo7.com.au/y7mail -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/attachments/20080425/ad0ead5a/attachment.html _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
