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Bill Berry: Slow down, and save a soldier's life

Bill Berry  —  7/22/2008 5:22 am

The next time someone says government is too big and powerful, consider it a lot of hot air.

Sure, government is good at throwing around a lot of money. Look at the Bush administration and Congress hustling to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-created but privately owned housing finance companies. Fortunately, few Americans know much about these institutions, led by CEOs with salaries in the double-digit millions. Otherwise people might get mad.

The government has also financed a war in Iraq that costs $370 million a day and killed tens of thousands of people, but most Americans haven't been obliged to do much more than slap a metallic ribbon on the back of their oversized vehicles.

Now that even the Bush administration is willing to admit the war in Iraq is and always was about oil, you'd think the patriotic fervor would have risen beyond metallic ribbons, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Here's a fun exercise in measuring patriotism and the power of government: Drive the speed limit on any major highway in Wisconsin and count the number of vehicles with metallic ribbons that pass you. Then count the number that have been pulled over for driving well above the speed limit. Hint: One number will be huge, the other small.

You'd think that people would get the simple connection that driving slower and less frequently would save money and gasoline and help keep our sons and daughters out of dangerous places. But apparently not, and the government isn't about to try to convince them otherwise.

In response to the rising cost of gasoline, a few politicians of both stripes have begun to call for action. They include Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, who has suggested that Congress might want to impose a national speed limit. You can almost hear the howling now from those who want to guard the inalienable rights of Americans to pour gasoline down a rat hole.

Predictably, some will argue that driving slower doesn't save much gasoline. Warner anticipated that, so he asked the Energy Department to look into what speed limit would provide optimum gasoline efficiency, given current technology. Independent groups have already run tests that show savings of up to 14 percent on a 50-mile trip by driving 65 instead of 75. In any case, we really don't need a government study to tell us that driving 75 to 80 mph in a big, honking SUV or any other vehicle wastes gasoline. Simply enforcing the current speed limits would be a plus, but the big, bad government appears incapable of doing that.

Warner himself cited studies that showed the 55 mph speed limit instituted in 1974 saved 167,000 barrels of oil a day, or 2 percent of the country's highway fuel consumption, while avoiding up to 4,000 traffic deaths a year. That national speed limit was revoked in 1995. Of course, by then most of us had been ignoring it for years anyway, and the big, bad government wasn't about to stop them.

Still, even if government is incapable of enforcing laws, maybe Warner and others are onto something. If we reduce the speed limit to 55 mph nationally, people might drive 65 mph under the "wink-wink" speed limit enforcement system currently in place. That would lead to big savings. Toss in a few thousand lives saved annually from fewer traffic accidents too.

A side benefit would be that people who drive at reasonable speeds wouldn't get the finger as often from other drivers who have to change lanes as they hurdle past.

While Warner seeks more information, California U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, a Democrat, has proposed a national speed limit of 60 mph for freeways in urban areas and 65 mph in less populated areas.

Opponents of the measure include groups that purport to represent motorists. "If they want to get in the right-hand lane and drive 55 mph on the highway, there is no restriction on that," said Jim Baxter, president of the National Motorists Association, a group formed in 1982 to repeal national speed limits.

Try that on I-94 if you're really brave.

At the state level, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm has suggested that her state should consider lowering its speed limit from the current 70 mph. But Granholm can't be trusted. She openly admitted that she rides her bicycle to work two days a week. The next thing you know, she'll want to put solar panels on the governor's residence in Lansing.

Bill Berry of Stevens Point writes a semimonthly column for The Capital Times.

Bill Berry  —  7/22/2008 5:22 am