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On the way home from paying some of Gilliam County's taxes, I was thinking about the problem of high speed limits and people who don't feel comfortable driving that fast feeling forced to. Also, encouraging fuel conservation is a good thing. What I came up with is the following:
1. Go back to the Basic Speed Rule and set the "max" speed at the maximum a reasonably competent driver in a typical modern car can drive safely on the road, as determined by driving professionals.
2. Set an "Energy Conservation" speed at 75% of the Max speed.
3. As with the old Basic Speed law, exceeding the max speed is "prima facie" evidence of driving unsafely, and gets you a pretty stiff ticket. Except if you have been driving for at least 10 years, and have had no accidents, your fault or not, in the last 10 years. That is "prima facie" evidence that you are a good, defensive, driver whose judgement can be relied on to determine when it's safe to drive fast and when it's not.
4. To better manage the speed differences that will occur, if you're outside a large city (I think they're using 50,000 for the speed limit raising under consideration), you cannot use the leftmost lane if you're driving less than half the difference between the EC and the MX speeds. For example, if the EC speed is 60mph and the MX is 80mph (a reasonable setting for the freeways), you can't use the left lane unless you're going at least 70. You would be allowed to use it to pass, as long as you are passing the traffic on the right at a speed at least 5mph faster than they are going --- you can't go over there and sit claiming you're "passing" them.
5. If you're in an accident, you lose speeding priviledges, and if you caused it, it's an automatic Reckless Driving charge, and you are limited to the EC speed for the next 5 years. A second accident in those 5 years and your license is suspended for 5 years from the time of the second accident.
6. Drunk driving would carry 5 year suspension on first offense, and permanent suspension on second. I'm not sure just what state a given blood alcohol content maps too, but at a certain point (.2? .15?) where you're obviously drunk with significant motor impairment, it would also carry an attempted manslaughter charge.
Anyhow, that's how I would reform driving laws if I had any say in it...
Posted by abatie at April 21, 2005 09:08 PM