Today network travel got a speed limit.
When President Nixon set a national maximum speed of 55 miles per hour ("mph") as part of the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act on this day in 1974, it superseded limits that had been set by states (and had variedly widely) ever since President Eisenhower and the U.S. automobile lobby gave us the Interstate Highway System in the mid-1950s. Prior to that, speed limits had been set by, well, the limits of speed possible, though in 1652 the colony of New Amsterdam had found it necessary to keep horses from galloping, and Connecticut felt compelled in 1901 to limit motor vehicles to 8 mph in cities and 12 mph everywhere else. Even in 1930 a dozen states had no speed limit whatsoever, instead content to let drivers decide what constituted "fast enough" just as they do on some portions of Germany's Autobahn even today.
By most accounts, Nixon's limit was a failure. Studies on fuel savings and safety were, at best, conflicted. Less happily compliant states found ways around it (like changing speeds on different types of roads, and reducing the penalties for violations to a slap on the wrist), and the majority of drivers assumed 55 mph was a base over which a real upper limit hovered. The performance qualities of cars and trucks -- their engines, suspensions, fuel efficiency, whatever -- combined with the performance intentions of their owners won out over set speed limits, however set and policed. The national speed limit was repealed in 1995.
So the idea of imposing speed limits on network travel doesn't have such a good track record. You can't stop people from going where they want to go, as fast as they want to go.
(Image credit: Interstate 35, from paulmayes.com)
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