Texas gets ready to ramp speed limit up to 80 mph

AUSTIN, Texas — Not only is everything bigger in Texas, it's about to become faster, too.

By the end of the month, if all goes according to plan, the speed limit on more than 500 miles of west Texas interstates will rise to 80 mph. That will make Texas home to the highest posted limit anywhere in the United States.

The Texas Legislature fast-tracked the increased speed limit last year and unanimously recommended it, then the Texas Department of Transportation followed suit with feasibility studies that gave the green light.

Now all that remains is pro-forma approval by the Texas Transportation Commission, which is expected at a meeting in Austin today, and then the new signs will begin to go up along two flat, rural stretches of I-10 and I-20 as soon as this weekend, just in time for the traditional Memorial Day start of the summer racing, er, driving season.

Not for Texans such wimpy concerns as fuel efficiency or the sky-high cost of gasoline. Engineers may calculate that drivers burn 7 percent more gas per mile for every 5 mph increase in speed above 60 mph. Texans calculate that their Hummers need bigger gas tanks.

"Our mission is to go and seek out whether we can fulfill the requests of the driving public," said Mark Cross, spokesman for the state transportation department. "And the request from the public is they want to go faster."

Texas and 12 other states already permit drivers on some highways to travel at speeds up to 75 mph, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. But Texas transportation engineers determined that 85 percent of drivers on the two segments of I-10 and I-20 are already averaging 80 mph, 5 mph above the current 75 mph speed limit, so officials reasoned that raising the limit would simply be a bow to reality.

"We feel it's always safer to have motorists traveling at a more uniform speed," Cross said.

Richard Retting, senior transportation engineer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said he fears that the number and severity of accidents will inevitably increase when the speed limit is raised to 80 mph. The only question is by how much, he added.

"The idea that higher speed limits will make the roads safer cannot possibly be true," Retting said. "There's no mathematical formula that will say precisely what will happen, but it's clear that speed has a major impact on the number of crashes and the severity of injuries."

The Texas State Police, caught between the desires of the politicians who pay their salaries and the motorists whose welfare they are supposed to protect, have prudently decided to hug the median on the issue.

"We'll reserve judgment on injuries and accidents," said Tom Vinger, spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety. "But there's no doubt that people are going to push the envelope. Our concern is ... that people think they can drive 5 or 10 miles per hour faster than the speed limit. At 80 miles per hour, you have very little margin for error."