Originally published at: Texas's speed limit in 1940 was 45 mph | Boing Boing
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My dad spent part of his time growing up in Texas, and relates how my preacher grandad would often exclaim about speeding drivers, “Speed on brother! Hell ain’t half full!” 
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Yeah, well, at the time your legs were the crumple zone. If you were lucky.
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Also, have you seen “old” Interstate 10? Even brand-new, it was probably a little dangerous for driving, IMHO.
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The carmageddon fanatics here are going to go apeshit pretty soon, 30kph in all built up areas with significant residential use is now being recommended. Like it won’t make the tiniest bit of difference to their commute. Round the corner from me I see people accelerate way over 50 to break the red light and screech to a stop a hundred metres on and wait in the rest of the traffic. But their bleating will nonetheless be loud and lengthy.
Motorway speed limits need to go way down if we have any intention of meeting emissions targets. The consumption difference between 100 and 120 kph is huge. It is possible that lowering the speed on motorways to be closer to the speeds cars are at joining and leaving it may reduce tailbacks also.
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IDK about 1940, but this wasn’t the case in the late 50s/early 60s when I was a kid. I remember my dad doing 90mph over long stretches of Route 66 between Amarillo, TX and Albuquerque, NM in our ‘57 Chevy named Old Betsy. When we’d go over hills on the dirt roads on my grandparents ranch it sometimes felt like we’d go airborne. But I doubt there were any posted speed limits there.
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Sixteen years before the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956? You’d be safer doing a hundred today than 45 back then.
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I must admit, I’d be thrilled if this were still the case today
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Crumpled legs were the least of our worries. When we would go around ranch with my uncle we’d ride in the back of his pickup truck. He had ropes tied to the sides of the truck bed for us to hold onto so we wouldn’t bounce out. I was about 7 and my big brother would sit on me to hold me down. Good times……
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Yeah, between mandatory seatbelts (late 1950’s), actual testing of cars for crash safety (first done in the 1930’s but not mandated until 1968), and dozens of other minor safety features I would probably not feel remotely safe doing 45 in a 1940’s car.
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Have you ever driven a car made in the 1930s? They weren’t made to go much faster than that. Nor were the roads. A few years ago, my brother and I drove my 1940 LaSalle hearse down the length of Route 66 in the Lemons Rally. We sought out the oldest version of the road still in existence for each stretch. The car’s speedometer red line of 50 was about all the faster we were willing to drive. And that car was basically a brand new Cadillac in 1940. The car was happiest on the old narrow concrete roads that were made in its day.
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i think lower speeds would probably decrease travel time - certainly at or near rush hour. i can’t remember the last time i hit even 50 on a highway. the stop and go of people thinking they can go fast seems to cause a lot of the problems.
the main advantage to highways anywhere near a city seems to be the lack of stop lights. in between cities is a different thing of course. and then i really wish i could drive on to the back of a train, and wake up when the train arrives
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I grew up in Texas a little after that. I was born in 1968. By then, the speed limits were considerably higher. My grandparents were killed in a head-on collision on US 287 near Jacksboro in 1969. Both cars were estimated to be going about 80 mph when the other driver crossed the center line. My grandparents’ car had seat belts, but they were only lap belts. Both suffered massive internal injuries, partly caused by the lap belts. Not that the result would have been any different if they hadn’t had any seat belts.
Anyway, yeah. Things were very different in 1940. The Interstate Highway system was still more than a decade away from its beginnings. Cars weren’t designed to drive all that fast. 60 mph was considered extremely fast for a production car at the time. So speed limits were typically in the 35-40 mph range, where they existed. And where they didn’t exist, people probably wouldn’t be driving much faster than that anyway.
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I owned a 1949 Hudson for a few years (not the Hornet unfortunately). Straight 6 and three-on-the-tree without the available overdrive. Top speed was about 60MPH and anything over 50MPH didn’t feel awesome. That was considered a pretty nice and advanced car in 1949, so I can see 45MPH being a reasonable speed limit in 1940 considering the most common car at that point was probably still the Model T (top speed: ~45MPH).
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That’s what I was thinking…
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I was just in Paris which has a speed limit of 30KPH on most non-major streets and rented a car because I had to drive outside the city. Given the terrible traffic there it actually made driving better in the city compared to last time I drove there a few years ago, and most people seem to generally be complying (not that there were tons of opportunities to drive a lot faster given the narrowness of the roads and the number of cars). Match this with emissions requirements in Paris and once the older diesel cars start to get taken off the road they will likely solve a lot of their air quality issues.
Of course there are a lot of Americans that would complain about their freedumbs if you tried this broadly in the US, but ultimately you probably would get a lot more compliance in built up areas compared to open highways. My personal view is that we need a lot more high speed rail in the US so for example I can stop having to decide between I5 and flying when I need to go from SF to LA.
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Lucky you. We never had no damn ropes. Although, occasionally you’d see the random truck with an extra bench seat bolted into the bed.
This week:
One tradesman on the news last night said he’d calculated the extra time he’d spend driving from job to job at 20mph as opposed to 30mph and it added up to £10k per year. There are several other stories on the Guardian’s site and BBC’s with a wide range of estimated costs to the economy overall.
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