Blogs & Ecology

A great way to get all the testosterone soaked hard core engineers who hate whining environmentalists wound up is to say something nice about Jimmy Carter, but here is another eminently sensible thing he did: He capped the maximum speed on speedometers in cars at 85 MPH.

That's what Kris De Decker over at Low-tech Magazine claims. He writes:

If we cut the average speed of all vehicles by half, fuel consumption would decrease by a whopping 75 percent. We quote:

"Breaking speed records was an almost daily happening throughout the 20th century. Cars, ships, planes and trains became faster and faster, year after year. Because the power needed to push an object through air increases with the cube of velocity, this race to ever higher velocities raises energy consumption exponentially."

...

Kent Sepkowitz makes a very interesting point in his New York Times op-ed No Need For Speed about car design: They are all designed to go faster than the law permits.

We noted earlier a study from the Harvard Medical School that calculated that for every 10% increase in gas prices there was a 2.3% decline in auto deaths.

Now a new report from Michael Sivak of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan finds an even more dramatic fall. Associated Press reports that:

Over the previous 10 months, monthly fatalities declined an average of 4.2 percent compared to the previous year. Then, Sivak's data shows, fatalities dropped 22.1 percent in March and 17.9 percent in April of this year...The declines found by Si...

We noted earlier a study from the Harvard Medical School that calculated that for every 10% increase in gas prices there was a 2.3% decline in auto deaths.

Now a new report from Michael Sivak of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan finds an even more dramatic fall. Associated Press reports that:

Over the previous 10 months, monthly fatalities declined an average of 4.2 percent compared to the previous year. Then, Sivak's data shows, fatalities dropped 22.1 percent in March and 17.9 percent in April of this year...The declines found by Si...

Image Credit: Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

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