On Friday, a speeding Salvation Army van crashed in suburban Chicago, killing ten people. That got me to thinking about ways to get drivers to slow down to the speed limit on Interstate highways.
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The van crashed at the cloverleaf interchange of Interstates 55 and 80. I-55 is the road from Chicago to New Orleans, via St. Louis and Memphis. I-80 is the road from San Francisco to New York City, making stops in Reno, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Des Moines, South Bend and Cleveland. The two roads intersect about fifty miles southwest of Chicago, at the southwest corner of Joliet, Illinois.
A television news report on WGN-TV, yesterday, confirmed the obvious: the van was going way too fast for the snowy, windy conditions. Those news reports contained complaints from previous passengers who had ridden in the van with that same driver. They said that he always drove the van way too fast, sometimes making a four-hour trip downstate in as little as two-and-a-half hours.
Print reports probably won't carry that information because Chicagoland newspapers are very religion-friendly. Salvation Army is Big Religion in Chicago. Our newspapers won't do anything to make religion look bad.
The Salvation Army driver, however, is far from being the only Interstate Highway cowboy who lets it rip as fast as he can go. Drivers commonly go eighty to eighty-five mile per hour in the fifty-five mph zones on Chicagoland expressways and tollways.
In outlying areas, where traffic is lighter, it really is fairly safe. The problems occur when when drivers are too stupid, selfish or irresponsible to SLOW DOWN WHEN IT'S SNOWING, YOU IDIOT!, or during other compelling conditions, like when there's heavy traffic, high winds or there's a state trooper parked under the viaduct a half-mile ahead, shooting radar. You know, it's not polite to put the trooper on the spot as to whether or not to get you when he's holding his big long instrument in his hand and pointing it in your direction. Slow down until you get past him; then do what you want. Did somebody say, "Bear in the air?"
Anyway, here in Illinois, we have tollways on some Interstate highways. The Illinois Toll Highway Authority offers a system, called I-Pass, to electronically collect tolls from you through the use of transponders, so you don't have to stop at those damn toll booths, every ten miles or so. The I-Pass transponders automatically deduct your toll from your pre-paid account each time you pass through a toll plaza. The transponder also keeps track of the date and time that you drive through each plaza, but that information is not used to enforce speed laws.
My proposal is that motorists be offered a discount on their tolls, each time that they travel between two toll plazas, at or below the speed limit. The Tollway Authority could easily program the computer system to know how far it is from one toll plaza to the next, and how long it would take to travel that distance, at or below the speed limit. When a motorist completed a trip between two toll plazas, the I-Pass computer could compare the time of the trip against the time it would take to travel the distance at or below the speed limit. If the motorist traveled the distance at the speed limit or slower, his toll would be at the discount rate. If he traveled the distance faster than speed limit, no discount. If he stopped at an Oasis or got slowed down by rush hour traffic, it's bonus time!
Sure, speed limits are way too slow on most of the tollways and expressways. I also propose that speed limits be reviewed and increased to much more reasonable levels.
Currently, however, all you get for doing the speed limit is the Finger Dance from passing motorists. That's when the guy passing you in the lane on your left, or the shoulder on your right, pumps his fist up and down in your direction with his middle finger extended.
My daughter, Dawn, invented the phrase, "Finger Dance," to describe something her mother does. Whenever my wife doesn't like it when I tell her what to do, as soon as I leave the room, Celeste does the Finger Dance behind my back, with both hands.
With my proposal, in addition to getting the Finger Dance, you'll get a discount on your tolls through your I-Pass account. If the program catches on, use of I-Pass transponder technology could be spread to freeways (the technology, not the tolls), where motorists who obey the speed limit could be rewarded, either with a discount on license plate renewals, discount coupons at sponsoring stores, or other appropriate financial relief.
Currently, the only reward for obeying the speed limit is that it costs you a tremendous amount of extra time, since getting a speeding ticket is extremely rare, unless your an asshole who travels at a speed that is substantially in excess of everybody else on the road, or your not paying attention to whether or not a trooper is either on your butt or parked on the side of the road up ahead. Safety generally isn't an issue. When 90% of the cars on the Interstate are traveling at 10 to 25 mph over the limit, and all are getting to their destinations safely during good weather and moderate traffic density, it means that the limits are too low, not that the drivers are going at a dangerously high speed. Maybe what we need, in addition to my other proposals, are signs that tell the idiots out there, "Slow down in heavy traffic and bad weather."
The way to get drivers to slow down to posted limits on Interstate highways, instead of driving at "Anything goes" speeds, is to offer a financial incentive to do so and to raise speed limits to more reasonable levels. Once again, the threat of financial penalty from a speeding ticket on the Interstates is so remote, when traveling with traffic at 10 to 25 over the limit, that most drivers are not intimidated by that prospect at all.
The next meeting of the Illinois Tollway Board of Directors will be on Thursday, February 22nd. I'm going to be there to pitch my ideas to them. I'll let you know what they say.
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