Province examines higher speed limits

Okay, time for some good, old-fashioned news commentary.

According to the CBC, Manitoba is looking at increasing speed limits on a bunch of highways, including the Trans-Canada, the Perimeter, and a bunch of the Interlake highways, #s 59, 7, and 8 (which everyone speeds on anyway).

Now, I should note that I am not in any way in favour of driving slowly: there is a reason that I no longer drive, and it's because I can't afford the speeding tickets.

That said, this should not be happening in 2006, of all times. Speed limits were originally instituted in the U.S. as a response to fuel shortages -- and adopted here for those reasons, and the documented improvement in road safety. While the quality of highways has increased to the point where 110 km/h is no longer a safety concern (nor, would I argue, is 130), if anything we should be more informed about the importance of conserving fuel than we were in 1970.

At the very least, if the province aims to up fuel consumption in this way, at the very least it should charge more tax on gas. Or it should just stop spending so much money on enforcement and use it on the development of greener vehicles, instead, anything but working with Katz to spend it all fixing potholes.

The Alberta government looked (warning: opens .pdf) at the costs and benefits of decreasing highway speeds, and found it to be not worth the additional cost in policing, nor the dangers associated with increased speed differentials (people going very, very different speeds) on the highway. The report also notes that vehicles are becoming more efficient at higher speeds.

Maybe so, but the vehicles that do better at higher speeds also have, generally, higher per-km consumption rates to begin with.

Anyway, the point is that the plan may or may not be a good idea, for any number of reasons -- but represents an utter lack of historical context in the decision-making bodies of the province, which frightens me to no end.

Even more problematically, Manitoba Public Insurance knows that the increasing travelling speed from 90 km/h to 120 km/h increases fuel consumption by 20 per cent. So why does the provincial government, which owns MPI and thus ostensibly commissioned this research, want to do the opposite of what it says?

I'm not going to say it's a stupid idea ... but I'm out of other things to say about it.

And there's my rant.