Remember OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries? Remember Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, probably the most famous oil minister in Saudi Arabian history?
You don’t hear much about either the man or the organization nowadays. But back in 1974 they were hot items–and Americans were hot under the collar because OPEC, personified by the suave, self-confident Yamani, had engineered a sudden, convulsive rise in the price of oil that knocked the U.S. economy and Americans’ daily lives into a cocked hat.
OPEC and Sheik Yamani may have disappeared from the radar screen. But another relic of the 1974 oil crisis–the 55 miles-per-hour speed limit–remains with us, although maybe not for long.
On Tuesday, the Senate, in a display of deregulatory, devolutionist zeal, voted to let states set their own highway speed limits, uninhibited by the threat of losing federal highway money. The House probably will follow suit later in the year. President Clinton ought to leap at the chance to sign the legislation.
Wisely or not, justifiably or not, concern about access to and adequacy of oil supplies has receded so much in importance among the American people that many of the terms that we used to use, like “energy independence,” now seem quaint.
So the original rationale for the 55-m.p.h. limit–to improve automobile gas mileage and “reduce our dependence on imported oil”–no longer holds. Indeed, it was more or less officially abandoned in 1987, when Congress voted to allow a 65-m.p.h. limit on rural (50 miles or more from a metropolitan area) interstate highways.
Along with the energy rationale, however, went whatever convincing justification there may have been for federal regulation of speed limits.
In the Senate debate Tuesday, the discussion revolved around safety. Supporters of the status quo argued that highway deaths will increase if the current limits are raised. They’re probably correct. There was a dramatic drop in deaths when the 55-m.p.h. limit was first adopted in 1974 and a noticeable bump upward after the 65-m.p.h. rural interstate exception was approved in 1987. And the U.S. Department of Transportation blames one-third of all highway deaths on speeding drivers.
But the issue here is not whether the limits ought to be raised, but who ought to decide. Energy is an appropriate concern of the federal government; safety is a traditional province of the states. If there is no federal concern at stake, then authority over speed limits ought to revert to the states. And once a state establishes a limit–whatever it turns out to be–it ought to be vigorously, conscientiously enforced.
