Bill aims to raise speed limit in Nevada

The worst drive in Nevada?

Is it the long slog from Las Vegas to Reno on U.S. Highway 95? The lonely U.S. Highway 50 between Ely and Fallon? Or maybe it’s the trek on U.S. Highway 395 between Reno and Carson City.

These kinds of drives can take forever, and seem even longer than that.

Which is why state Sen. Don Gustavson, R-Sparks, has pitched raising the top speed limit in Nevada to 85 mph.

If the proposal passes, Nevada would become the third state, behind Utah and Texas, to allow speeds faster than 75 mph.

“People are driving 80 or 85 anyway,” Gustavson said.

But there’s a catch.

The higher speed limit wouldn’t apply to any of the long, winding mostly two-lane roads that criss-cross the state. Not unless they got a major overhaul.

Current law allows the Nevada Department of Transportation to establish the speed limit on the roads it operates. That includes all the major highways in the state.

The law says the highest speed limit the agency can set is 75.

That’s what would change under Gustavson’s proposal.

He acknowledged his bill wouldn’t do anything to make the trip between Southern and Northern Nevada any quicker.

There are only two stretches of road in Nevada, both of them interstates, where the speed limit is currently 75. One runs for about 70 miles, from North Las Vegas to Mesquite on Interstate 15. The other runs for more than 300 miles, on Interstate 80 from Fernley almost to Utah.

Scott Magruder, an NDOT spokesman, said for the speed limit to be higher than 70, a road must meet these three requirements:

n be a divided highway;

n have limited access points; and

n have four lanes.

Most portions of the rural highways don’t meet any of these criteria. They never meet all of them.

The roads are typically two lanes. They’re rarely divided by medians. And there are small towns and private property all along the routes.

Magruder said it wasn’t even a given that the department would raise the speed limit on the two stretches of inter­state where it’s 75 now. He said they would need to study the area to determine if it was safe.

Pushkin Kachroo, director of the Transportation Research Center at UNLV, said higher speed limits can be safe.

“It has the potential to help if done right,” he said. “But just like a knife, you can cook with it or you can kill with it.”

There always has to be a balance between mobility and safety in any transportation endeavor, he said. You could make the roads fatality free by lowering the speed limit to zero. But no one would get anywhere and the economy would crash.

Erin Breen, a traffic safety advocate and director of UNLV’s safe community partnership, said raising the speed limit is a bad idea.

“The fact that people see the speed limit is 70 but feel it’s OK to go 80 or 85 is troubling,” she said. She said she thinks people would continue to exceed the speed limit if it were raised even higher.

Data from NDOT contradict the notion from both sides that people consistently exceed the speed limit in some areas.

A study done in 2008 shows that 85 percent of drivers, during clear weather and visibility, drive 76 to 77 mph in the 75 mph zone on I-80.

The 85 percent threshold is commonly used by transportation agencies to determine what a speed limit should be on a given road.

The NDOT data show Nevada’s drivers generally do stay at or near the speed limit on the state’s major highways, with the exception of portions of U.S. 95 in Clark County.

Magruder said that back when the national speed limits were repealed, the department raised the limits because few people were driving 55, even though it was the law.

But Breen worried that higher speeds could mean more deaths. She noted that speed is a leading cause of death in car crashes.

The data back her up.

The Metropolitan Police Department’s stats for 2012 show the department worked more than 23,000 crashes. There were 109 deaths in those crashes, which include 40 pedestrians and one bicyclist.

Excessive speed is listed as a “causal factor” in 26 percent of the fatal crashes.

Data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is similar. More than 30 percent of the 1,443 traffic fatalities in Nevada between 2007 and 2011 were speeding related, the federal agency found.

Data from the state Office of Traffic Safety indicates that only driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs and the failure to keep in the proper lane led to more fatal crashes than speed.

Studies done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an insurance industry group best known for its crash tests and the dummies it uses, show that deaths on rural interstates jumped more than 25 percent when speed limits were increased from 55 mph to 65 mph in the 1980s.

The 1995 repeal of all national speed limits led to a 15 percent increase in deaths, the institute estimates.

Despite that, Gustavson’s bill has a good chance of passing. It has numerous co-sponsors, including Senate leaders from both parties.

He said he is working on getting his presentation together for the state Senate Transportation Committee.

Magruder, from NDOT, said if the law passes and the governor signs it, the department will be ready to launch its studies.

“Theoretically,” he said, “it could happen by the end of the year.”

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.