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Highway 93 revisited

| November 8, 2007 12:00 AM

From the Bleachers

By Zach Urness

Over the last couple weeks, Lake County Citizens may have noticed that the little white speed limit signs have popped a few steroids, and have jacked themselves up from 65 to 70 mph.

The steroid, in this case, is a new law passed by the legislature.

Based on what I've read, the lawmakers have espoused three arguments in supporting the bill. The first is that increasing the speed limits will help counterbalance the current congestion on the highway. The second is that increasing the speed limit will limit road rage, and the third is that it makes sense because many of the roads connecting to Highway 93 have a speed limit currently set at 70 mph; therefore, Highway 93 should have a speed limit that is uniform.

I disagree.

To the first point, I agree that congestion may have increased in recent years, but it's not exactly the New Jersey turnpike. And from my observation, the congestion occurs within cities like Polson and Ronan, not out in the country where the increased speed would actually take effect.

As for limiting road rage: Have we really become so short tempered and impatient that instead of waiting five minutes for an appropriate time to whiz past someone with the audacity to drive a little slow, we have to raise the speed limit? What kind of standard does that set? It's like saying, "Okay, so you're an impatient jerk, but apparently there are a lot of you, so we'll go ahead and make other people drive faster so you can focus your rage somewhere else."

And it's not like raising the speed limit is really going to make that seven-ton camper equipped with a bathroom, a kitchen and an indoor amusement park drive up that hill any faster.

The third point about having highways at a uniform speed limit fails to resonate with me as well. Highways have different speed limits for a reason. I believe Highway 93 should have a lower speed limit because it is such a dangerous highway and has such a high number of deadly accidents.

And that brings me to what I feel is the most important point.

Highway 93 is one of the most, if not the most, dangerous and deadly highway in Montana. There isn't much discussion as to that. Behind heart disease and cancer, accidents are the leading killer of Lake County citizens. The motor vehicle accident death rate in Lake County is more than double the state average, and so is the percentage of crashes involving alcohol.

In 2006, Lake County had the deadliest roads in the state, and Highway Patrol trooper Jim Sanderson said at the time, "…when you analyze the crashes that were fatalities, most of them are in rural areas," he said. "That's attributable to a higher rate of speed."

Highway 93 is already a bad situation, so why make it worse?

Upping the speed limit on Highway 93 is like putting a morbidly obese person on a diet of Big Macs or giving a recovering alcoholic a shot of Jack Daniels.

It's not that I have anything against driving fast; hell, I used to love to drive fast and still might if my Honda Civic didn't accelerate like it was being powered by a lawn mower engine.

In the not-so-distant past as a high school student, I even managed to pull off a trifecta of speeding tickets in one year.

During the fallout I learned two important lessons.

First, just because street racing looks cool in The Fast and the Furious does not mean it's a good idea against your friends on the main highway into downtown Minneapolis.

Secondly, after being pulled over for the above incident I learned, from a very annoyed police officer, that for each mile per hour of speed you gain, you reduce the control you have over your vehicle and your reaction time goes down dramatically.

The general rule here is that the probability of serious injury increases by double for every 10 mph over 50 mph and, according to a Website run by a national law enforcement group, speed is a factor in one-third of all fatal crashes nationwide.

Look, I am not advocating that the speed limit plummet to 55 mph nationwide. I even think that it's fine to have speed limits higher than 70 mph on four-lane interstate highways with wide shoulders and ditches.

But 70 mph on a two-lane mountain road with shoulders that are generally small and even non-existent; ditches that are in some places larger than Flathead Lake; fog that at times makes it feel like you're driving in a sauna; black ice, intermittent construction, an already huge problem with drunk driving and one of the highest percentages of deadly crashes in the nation?

Brilliant.