Keep speed limits lower to benefit people and Earth

“Higher speed limit worth a look?” I wondered, as I read the editorial page heading for the Dec. 5 Daily Inter Lake. There’s a bill being draftedfor the 2015 legislative session that would increase speed limits on Montana highways. The legislators say that the big states that surround us, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho, have all done so, without incident. The reasoning is, if we spend less time on the highways, that has the potential to reduce accidents. So true!

Sure, we’d all like to go faster to get where we want to sooner, but isn’t there some ecological payback for that? Since Montana is such a big state in size, a heavier foot on the gas pedal would certainly be a welcome change. The editorial asks us to remember the good old years when Montana didn’t have a speed limit, just a $5 gas conservation fine. Shouldn’t our importance as Montana residents be considered?

After all, driving from Kalispell to the Bakken, Billings or Helena, for business, government or just vacationing, is a long and tedious task. Our state legislators, Rep. Mike Miller and Rep.-elect Art Wittich tell us that raising the speed limit on interstate highways will not cause a problem.

Take a look at a color map of our state. Rural routes are in red and interstates are blue. There are a lot more rural highways and they tend to have higher speed limits. Rural highways in other states tend to have higher speed limits, too. Crashes at higher speeds have a greater possibility of resulting in a fatality, according to a representative of the Insurance Institute for Higher Safety. Political leaders and traffic engineers have to decide on whether to give us that trade-off.

But we’re forgetting a few things. Raising the speed limit also means burning more of the Earth’s precious reserves of gasoline and oil. And increasing fuel consumption, even if you have the newest gadgets on your hybrid cars, means more carbon dioxide in the air that we breathe. Raising speed limits means for every 5 mph driven over 60 mph equates to paying an additional 24 cents per gallon for gas, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

It costs lives and it costs energy at a time when we should be reducing energy use. What we really should be doing is keeping our present speed limits, which would have the benefit of both saving lives and saving fuel. —Mary Mosher, Kalispell