🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Mar18.131757@thuja.gsfc.nasa.gov> karl@thuja.gsfc.nasa.gov (Karl A. Anderson) writes:

>They're welcome to spend _my_ money on that.  Keeping the limit at 55
>mph saves gas, keeps pollution (including greenhouse gases) lower, and
>saves my money by keeping accident rates lower, thereby keeping
>insurance claims and thus premiums lower.  Oh, yeah - it save lives,
>too.

FYI: For my car (Eclipse) the optimum speed for fuel economy is
ballpark 65 (based on MPH/RPM and also seeing how many miles I go per
tank varying driving method and average speed).  Other owners of the
same car report pretty much the same so for at least one car the "55
saves gas" is bogus.  It may be that for the newer cars they have
better efficiency at higher speeds.  

I've never seen any data to support that 55 is the optimal speed for
fuel efficiency although I did see one 1970's era report that
indicated for that generation of cars 45 MPH was optimal (I think it
was put out by some offical commission to investigate the gas
crunch...it has been years since I've looked at this stuff).  The
people who came up with that magic 55 number have stated that it was
pretty much arbitrary and not really driven by much more than opinion
that said "55 saves a little gas over 65 and 70 and 45 seemed a little
too slow for the interstate".  

The safety kick came later by the insurance companies as a way to
maintain using speeding tickets as a method of raising rates.

According to some consumer safety groups (get a Nader flyer or one of
the many random consumer protection type of organization handouts)
speed is not the problem but speed differential has a high correlation
with accidents...even safety ghod Nader has said something to that
effect (although he spends more time complaining about the auto
industry and shoddy design).

According to a lot of various articles by various engineers the rule
of thumb for the correct way to determine a safe speed limit is to
measure traffic flow and speed and pick the 80th percentile mark as
the speed limit.  This ought to keep most people going the same speed
and violators are then really causing a safety problem.

>Banning radar detectors would help to enforce the lower limit,
>obviously.

Banning radar detectors doesn't do much for enforcement and is illegal
to boot as far as I can tell.

Now, IMHO Geico is one of the worst of the bunch of crooks we call
insurance companies and pay large amounts of money to.  Their lobbying
is in their own interests not yours and any idiot can maintain low
rates and high profit by eliminating anyone who is even marginally
risky.  GEICO isn't in the market to insure people or protect their
lives and property but make money...at whatever cost to our civil
liberties.

>--
>Karl A. Anderson		| Internet: karl@thuja.gsfc.nasa.gov

Nigel Tzeng