8: Speed and Safety

Speeding is logically related to mobility and subjectively related – for many people at least – to pleasure. Unlike the dangers of drinking and driving and the benefits of seat belts, about which there is a near-consensus, people’s perceptions of the relationship between speed and crashes are quite varied. In an analysis of annual U.S. survey of Americans’ health maintenance habits that we conducted over 15 years ago (Shinar, Schechtman, and Compton, 1999) we found that from 1985 to 1995 the self-reported use of seat belts increased dramatically, drinking and driving decreased consistently (though to a lesser degree), but the percent of people who said that they exceeded the speed limit actually increased (Figure 8-1). Sadly – in the case of speeding – this trend in the U.S. has continued into the first decade of the 21st century, where the involvement of drinking and driving and non-use of seat belts in fatalities decreased monotonically from 1985 to 2010, while the involvement of speeding in traffic fatalities remained at a relatively constant 30-35 percent (GHSA, 2012; NHTSA, 2015). This is particularly alarming as speed is possibly the most over-involved single factor in severe traffic crashes. At the same time, in a particularly insightful book on the state of traffic safety policy, Johnston, Muir, and Howard (2014) argue convincingly that speed moderation is the most difficult issue of all. One possible reason for this difficulty is the schism between the beliefs people have about the dangers of speeding and their own acknowledged speeding. In a 2011 survey of a random sample of 16+  years old Americans, the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety (AAAF, 2012) found that although speeding by over 15 mph (24 km/hr) above the speed limit on the highway was considered completely unacceptable by 50 percent of the drivers, 68 percent acknowledged doing it at least once in the past 30 days, and speeding by more than 15 mph (24 km/hr) above the speed limit on residential streets was considered completely unacceptable by 78 percent of the drivers, yet 30 percent acknowledged doing it at least once in the past 30 days.