Cycle World Up Front

CYCLE WORLD UP FRONT

The Thief of Time

ALLAN GIRDLER

Crawling along in front of me was an 18-wheeler that kept slowing down. Snorting along behind me was an 18wheeler that kept speeding up. The road was a broken, narrow, two-lane relic permanently bisected by an inviolate double yellow line. There was no shoulder, limited visibility and plenty of onComing traffic so I had no urge to cross

the lines. Instead I flinched and soldiered on, until...

Freedom! The good oF Interstate, six gleaming, empty lanes of smooth, dry, flat pavement. I dropped down two gears. Soon as I’d cleared the no-passing lane I zoomed around the truck and into the middle distance, singing the tourist’s hymn, “So Long, Traffic Jams.”

Awk. Out from behind the bridge came a distinctly painted sedan. So sure was I that I’d been seen and recorded that I was parked on the shoulder, engine off, helmet off, license at the ready before the trooper even had time to turn on his light.

He was a big, friendly trooper.

“Well,” he drawled, “c’mon back to the par and I’ll show you what the machine says you were doing, then we’ll see how tfnuch of that you can talk me out of.”

The machine said 75. But he’d settle for 64. He explained that would allow him not to report the incident to my home state or my insurance company.

He gave me a citation, a form by which I could compute my own fine, and an envelope addressed to the local judge.

Ml I had to do was write a check, affix a stamp, pop the envelope into the slot and the incident was closed.

What a nice man. What a quick, easy, polite way to do business.

What a farce.

How we made a mockery of our traffic and law enforcement system is easily explained. In January, 1974, close on the heels of the first gas crunch and in the echo of shouts from the safety lobby, we motorists got a national speed limit, hereafter referred to as the NSL, of 55 mph, on all public roads, all the Ifime. This was classic politics. Congress *got to proclaim itself as Taking Action, while the individual members of Congress are themselves exempt from the results of the action.

Their ostensible reason was concern for us. This limit, they said and perhaps even believed, would save fuel and lives.

The NSL has done neither. There is no space here for the evidence of that bald statement. I refer skeptics to our companion publication, Road & Track, the May 1980 issue, where the governmental and safety lobby claims are demolished.

My purpose here is to worry about what the NSL has really done.

But first, I am concerned about reactions to my opposition. Last time we mentioned the NSL, (and to my great surprise) we got letters against our opposition. People acted as if we had endorsed mindless careening on public roads, the abolition of all limits.

I mean nothing of the kind. Speed limits, that is, a law or ordinance establishing a permitted speed for a given stretch of public road, are needed. They can serve the purpose of public safety and the public welfare.

There are three ways to set such limits. One, the professional way. Traffic engineers examine the road. They work out the width, the vision, the curves and grades, the oncoming and side traffic, the density of vehicles on the road. They can then determine how fast a prudent and qualified driver can

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Two, the 85th percentile. This is also done by professionals. Traffic engineers clock traffic on the road in question. Most people travel at a pace that lets them feel comfortable. The engineers learn how fast 85 percent of the people go. That becomes the limit and the nonconformists obey or get cited .

Three, people with influence and no knowledge impose an arbitrary limit, a number seemingly picked because it’s slower than most people go: making us do what we wouldn’t otherwise do, is bound to be good for us.

Granted, I am an offender against the NSL, I have been caught and fined, therefore I am personally involved and have no trouble justifying myself.

Even so, the NLS is doing us all harm.

The collective we, riders and drivers, have become scofflaws. We all break the law several times each day.

Our state officials have become liars. The feds require compliance: because the people ignore the law, the states are threatened with loss of federal funds, aka the money taken from us, if the states don’t make us observe the federally-imposed limit. We don’t, they can’t, but all the states solemnly swear they’re meeting their quotas.

We are eroding respect for the law.

We are a society based on faith, on trust. Laws are supposed to be based on common sense and fair play. We proceed on the green because we can rely on the other guy to stop on the red. But now we have a law not based on common sense, but on political display. We don’t obey the NLS, the law that most affects us most of the time. If 65 is okay in a 55 if nobody’s watching, then 45 in a 35 is okay, and so it is okay to roll through the stop sign, and so forth. If dad has junior play chickee on the interstate, why can’t junior ditch school?

We are damaging our police.

Due to years as a newspaper reporter,

I am strongly pro-cop. They are the good guys. They do a thankless job and the vast majority do it well. Their motto used to be Serve and Protect.

Thanks to the NSL, it’s become Observe and Collect. The thin blue line, the army against the truly bad, has become ticket takers.

Statisticians would call this anecdotal evidence. But what sticks in my mind was the time I rode across a western state and found myself in an armed camp. The cashier at the service station was barricaded behind steel bars and bulletproof glass. She took my money before I could get gas. The clerk at the convenience store was in a booth like those in prisons.

So there I am on the Interstate and I come over the hill. Herded together on the shoulder is a flock of captives. Motorists. There’re the airplane and swarms of police cars. They’ve clocked the traffic and now the offenders will be taken in convoy to see the judge. The highway is safe from speeders, the city is left to the robbers.

Worse. Two kids from my area were killed. They were riding their minicycle down the street, a neighborhood street and a drunk rammed them from behind. You can imagine how drunk you’d have to be to go that fast and be that blind. But nobody noticed because the police don’t patrol neighborhoods, not when they need to leap out of the bushes with radar along the parkway.

Unfair, of course. I can’t prove the robbers would be deterred if the cops weren’t on the highway. I can’t prove a squad car in the neighborhood would have seen that drunk in time.

But the image remains.

When the trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco takes nine hours instead of eight, the NSL has taken an hour I could have spent with a book, or with the kids.

That’s an hour I’ll never have again. 0