What emergency do you have in mind where 90mph is too slow? The average driver is far, far more likely to cause another emergency at that speed than avoid one.
I think his idea is that there are times where the safest thing to do is to accelerate out of a dangerous situation on the road. Which is sort of true, but at those speeds most cars tend not to accelerate very quickly so I don't find it particularly convincing.
Yeah, I’m really skeptical just because at that speed human reaction times are so limited. It seems like the guys who said they should have to pay for seatbelts because if they crashed into a lake it might be hard to get out without drowning - true at least once, somewhere, but orders of magnitude less common than the times where a seatbelt kept someone alive.
In lots of situations speed doesn't really limit how much time you have to react, because it's something like "someone is merging into you without noticing you" or "you and someone on the other side of an empty lane both started to merge into it".
But ya, the statistical argument of how often does accelerating out really help, vs. often is someone driving too fast the cause of the danger, seems very relevant.
I was thinking of the only time in 3 decades of driving where speeding up made sense: I was on the 405 in LA and I was behind some guy who had a stack of mattresses poorly tied onto the back of a pickup truck. The top one flew surprisingly high up and I realized that the way it had caught the wind meant that if I braked it would land pretty close to me, so I went under instead and it landed a few car lengths behind me. At 45mph, in my early 20s, driving a sporty car that worked out but at 90mph I don’t think I’d have had time to process it quickly enough. I also note that this was once a long time ago where as I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been endangered by someone going much too fast or seen the aftermath (cars in buildings, upside down on the wrong side, etc.) so I would in a heartbeat take a world where the extreme speed outliers are gone.
Does emergencies make speeding legal for usual cars? I could imagine police cars or ambulances could be exempt from the rule. Also, adjusting the insurance cost based on the speed limiter seems a balanced policy to me regardless of those freeways.
Why imagine? Police cars, ambulances and fire engines already are exempt from speed limits. But only if they actually are rushing to an emergency with lights and horns on. They are also allowed to go through red traffic lights.
Except at night to not wake you up they might not have the horn blaring then. But they also understand how much faster to go, when to have the horn enabled even at night, know to approach a red light slowly even if they have right of way and you are supposed to let them pass etc.
I believe low speed limits were raised in Texas due to the number of drowsy driver accidents that were occurring due to the amount of time it took to transit the state at the lower speed limits. Everything is a trade-off.
Clearly the experienced highway engineers in charge balancing a ton of different variables to make the Texas road network function in accordance with its design goals should have sought your advice.
Indeed, I haven't. I'm from rather farther north. I have driven reasonably long distances at reasonably high speeds though. If you ask me whether I'd have rather save 30 minutes on a 9 hour drive or have the speed limit top out at 85* I'm definitely picking the latter. If you ask me if I'd rather have people driving through a community I'm living in at 90 mph or 85 mph I'm definitely picking the latter.
* El Paso to Dallas is 635 miles, driving the whole way at 85 mph would take 25 more minutes than driving the whole way at 90mph. The reality is even further in 85 mph's favor because you aren't able to sustain 90mph the whole way and we're only going slower when we would be able to.