Speeding – Everybody’s Not Doing It

Q: I’ve heard that because of Covid-19 the police aren’t doing traffic enforcement. That seems problematic. Lately there has been less traffic on the roads but I’ve heard about way more people speeding. What’s being done to stop all the speeders?

A: Maybe you’ve read the headlines: traffic volumes are down; vehicle speeds are up, and speeding crashes are nearly a pandemic in themselves. I’ve read them too; like the guy in the Corvette doing 192 mph (yes, that’s not a typo) on Highway 2 last month. You might start to think that most people on the road are speeding. But is that really true?

My dad taught me to be suspicious of “everybody’s doing it” statements, so thought I’d find out for myself. I borrowed a speed-measuring device (also known as a radar gun) and headed out to what I thought would be a prime location for speeding.

I set up on Birch Bay Lynden Road. It’s flat, straight and wide, and there are no stop signs for a couple miles in each direction; kind of ideal for someone who wanted to speed. It also has a history of serious and fatal crashes, which is readily apparent if you look at the several memorial sites families have erected to remember their loved ones.

My plan was to capture speeds for 100 vehicles. Rather than try to take notes on vehicle speeds as they happened I set up a video camera that I could reference later. Only after I started did I realize that I didn’t have a way of tracking when I’d reach 100 cars. I erred on the side of excess and when I reviewed the video found I’d measured 158 vehicle speeds. Take a look at the results:

Almost all the drivers are clustered within a few miles per hour of the speed limit. Yes, driving one mile an hour over the posted speed limit is, by the letter of the law, a violation. But realistically, if you’re driving within a few miles per hour of the law, either faster or slower, you’re not the problem. To quote a local police officer, “We’re not looking to nail you for two miles an hour over the speed limit. We’re talking about the goofballs that are driving like, you know, Nascar.”

The dangerous speeders, which I’ll define as drivers going 10 mph or more over the speed limit, made up, in my experiment, less than two percent of drivers. Even drivers going more than five mph over the speed limit account for less than eight percent of drivers. But speeding is a factor in 31 percent of all fatal crashes in Washington. The reality is, most of us (over 90 percent in my brief observations) are driving at safe speeds and reducing our risk.

Speeding is a problem for at least two reasons: reaction time and physics. Let’s start with reaction time. Our eyes and brains are not designed to capture data at the speeds of our current modes of travel. The faster you drive, the less time you have between when you notice a hazard and when you hit it, and we’re not very good at noticing things at high speed.

Once you do notice a hazard, there’s the time it takes to stop to avoid it. Braking distance is longer with higher speeds, obviously, but it’s not a direct correlation. As speed increases, braking distance increases even more. Overall stopping distance roughly triples when you double your speed.

And then there’s physics. Even if speeding didn’t increase the frequency of crashes (and it does), speed on impact determines your outcome. We’ll skip the math, but the relationship between speed and impact force is exponential: when speed doubles, impact force quadruples. There are limits to how much impact force a human can sustain, and high speed crashes easily surpass those limits.

You might also be surprised at where that point is. The data show that by the time you approach 50 mph, your risk of driver fatality in a front-end collision is worse than 50/50. At 70 mph it’s almost a guarantee.

So what about the few people who are speeding? I spoke with a couple members of our local law enforcement community. They both assured me that Covid-19 has not stopped them from enforcing speeding laws and looking for dangerous speeders. To quote one of them, “If you’re one of those drivers who follow the traffic laws and obey the speed limits, thank you. But if you’re one of those people who chose to drive dangerously, we’ll be looking for you.”