[winter_blue]

On a tangential note, these lawmakers failed to see the real consequence of a 55 mph speed limit: the invisible economic loss of longer commute times probably far outweighed any of the minor 0.5 to 1% savings in gas.

Those hours spent on the road are hours that people could be spending with their family, at work, or doing whatever else they like.

According to the Census Bureau, 128 million today commute daily in the US. Let's say they spend an average of 30 minutes on the highway at a top speed of 65 mph. If we raised the speed limit by 50% (to 97.5 mph), then the average commute would become: 30 / 1.5 = 20 minutes.

Each individual would save 10 minutes a day. With 252 working days a year, that's 2520 minutes saved a year -- which is a total of 42 hours saved per year. That's a lot of time. Across 128 million commuters, we'd save 5.376 billion hours per year. If people earned an average of $20/hour, that would be $107 billion of added economic activity per year. Whereas even 1% of gas savings would not be more than $2 billion saved per year.

[devdas]

People would just live farther away.

[Tomte]

Don't you have construction sites or slower cars?

I'm regularly driving 150 kilometers on the fabled Autobahn, with no speed limit for the most part (and some 120 km/h speed limit sections), and the difference between "I feel great, let's drive 180" and "Let's take it slow and drive 100 or 110" is surprisingly small, because that top speed is only attainable for short stretches of time.

[dsfyu404ed]

Obviously traffic varies by city, road and time of day but on the nominally 55-mph section of I95 around Boston traffic flows between 65 and 90ish if it's not precipitating with the exception being peak commuting hours when the choke points cause enough of a disruption to make most of the system flow well below that speed. Even if you knock 10mph off those speeds because older cars aren't quite as quiet and smooth at any given speed it still results in traffic speeds well above 55.

All the 55mph limit on that particular road does in my mind is give law enforcement a pretext to make fishing stops.

I can't recall a time I ever saw traffic go ~55 on a limited access road without the presence of inclement weather or severe traffic congestion. When you consider the kind of traffic conditions that are the norm in rural ares I don't think a national 55mph speed limit makes sense at all.

Edit: I'm curious to know how a comment that is simply stating my observations and opinions can be considered so wrong.