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*Originally posted by Squink *
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Clinton did not want to return the power of speed limits to the states nor did he want any raise in the speed limit. But the bill he signed had increased spending for highway construction that he supported and congress had the votes to over-ride a veto. He begrudgingly signed that law!!!
Yeah, right. During the day, traffic congestion keeps things around 35, and at night (say, 2:00 AM), THAT’S when you can get up to 85 or so.
Personally, I blame the teletubbies.
Hey, I’m wondering… when we finally get flying cars (we were SUPPOSED to have them NOW), how fast do you think they’ll go?
Depends if you mean while in cruise, or while plummeting to the ground after an engine seizes because someone forgot to put oil in it.
Mistakes like that in a car are annoying, and funny if you’re not the one paying for them. In an airplane, they kill lots of people.
You’re not going to see mass commuter aircraft in your lifetime. Not even a Moller Skycar. It’s not that the technology is that far off, but the human factors are simply overwhelming. Think about how many stalled cars you see in a week. Think of all the car accidents you see. Now consider that each stall means a high likelihood of a fatality, and each accident is 10 times worse. Imagine Skycars hitting high-rises going 300 mph. It’d be like a bomb going off.
Now imagine that the system is in place, everyone’s at work, their skycars happily perched on their landing pads, and suddenly a snowstorm comes up. Thousands of people are suddenly stranded from home. And of course a bunch of idiots will try to fly home anyway, and die stupidly. But in an urban mass transit scenario, they’ll die by slamming into someone’s house.
Not gonna happen. If someone comes up with a suitably easy-to-fly, somewhat automated aircraft that is cheap and safe, you might see a surge in private pilots. But we’re talking about a tiny percentage of the population anyway, and they’ll still have to fly in the ATC system which means 1000’ AGL over built-up areas, no rooftop landings, etc. So no commuting, except for the odd lucky soul who lives near a small airport and has a job near another small airport 100 miles away or more.
You might see a slight increase in the use of personal aircraft for rig workers, farmers, and those kinds of people. And that’s about it, probably for the rest of our lives. Change happens SLOWLY in aviation - the most popular aircraft engines used today were designed in the 1930’s, and the average age of the general aviation fleet is over 20 years. Many of the private airplanes being flown today are 40-50 years old, and if they have new paint on them I defy you to be able to tell some of them from a brand new 2001 light airplane.
Power over speed limits may have been given back to the states in 1995, but as I recall the limit went up to 65 on rural interstates during the Reagan Administration. In the early '90s the limit was 65 on a lot of highways in Ohio and Michigan, though Pennsylvania and New York kept 55 until 1995 or '96.
(In 1994 I was on I-80 in PA heading for the Ohio line. My usual policy on long trips is to peg it at about 4-5 MPH over the limit, and I didn’t think the state trooper I passed would come after me…until he did, and I realized I’d gotten ahead of myself and was going 70 rather than 60. That particular brain fart cost me 170 bucks or so.)
There is an another, altogether erudite, philosophical, theoretical, etc., etc., reason to not lower the speed limit back to 55. It is bad for the good order of society to enact laws that are going to be ignored.
I remember reading an utterly fantastic quotation from Cicero or some such dead smart guy for this proposition. Pretend I cited it here, and be impressed. 
Sua
Sam, your skepticism on personal flying machines is warranted, but grab a copy of the latest Discover mag and read about the Firebird chopper. It’s a single seat helicopter that runs on hydrogen peroxide with a waste product of steam.
These things are currently being exploited for military purposes, but they hold promise. A kit could be available for $30,000 becuase FAA allows for experimental licenses for home-built aircraft. Sweet.
Unfortunately, the article does not mention how fast these things can go, but man o’ man, gimme one of those. I HATE traffic.
I thought they just used that extra lane… what do pedestrians call them? Sidewalks? 
Was this thread started as a serious question, or just for the purposes of bashing “liberals”? (When I saw the title and author of the thread, I was wondering why a thread suggesting lowering the speed limit back down to 55 was authored by pkbites. When I read his post, I understood.)
Anyway, this liberal is not in favor of going back down to 55. As others have noted, the historical reason for going to 55 was for energy conservation. As has also been noted here, there are lots of other low-hanging fruit one could pick these days for energy conservation without resorting to a lower speed limit, besides which, I believe that cars may operate more efficiently at the higher speeds now due to advances in transmissions and aerodynamical engineering.
And, as has also been noted, one reason that fatalities might not have decreased when the 55 limit came down is that people didn’t really increase their speeds that much. The law was already being widely violated and probably not even very stringently enforced in Western states that didn’t like it on their long flat stretches of road.
By the way, while I know it is lots of fun to bash liberals, one reason automobile fatalities have been falling over the last 30 or so years, particularly as measured per passenger mile (where I think they have dropped by like a factor of 3), is because people like Ralph Nader pushed the government into dragging automobile companies kicking and screaming toward safety features that they now heavily advertise on their cars. (Some of these features admittedly rely on new technology that may not have been available 30-odd years ago, but some use technology that had been invented long, long before that.)
The other thing that I think is dangerous is people not keeping a proper following distance. Both fast impatient drivers and slow drivers who stay in the left lane are to blame for this and both should probably be targetted by police, at least to receive warnings.
It runs on hydrogen peroxide? Um, no thanks. Pure hydrogen peroxide is highly reactive, dangerous to handle, breaks down when exposed to light, and is somewhat hard to come by (IIRC, the stuff sold for disinfecting wounds is a solution of about 3% hydrogen peroxide in rubbing alcohol).
Wrath: There are lots of awesome experimental planes and helicopters that you can buy and build today. The Rotorway Exec is a small 2-seat helicopter that has been available for decades for something like $30K (much more now, I believe).
For that matter, you can buy an older Cessna 150 for maybe $12,000, and commute with it if you are near an airport. It would be much cheaper to own than a newer car.
But there’s a big difference between these proven designs and some of the pie-in-the-sky designs that have been floating around forever without becoming reality. There is a reason why ducted-fan VTOL airplanes aren’t readily available, and it has to do with power-to-weight ratios, fuel consumption, and the danger of losing an engine while in hover. The Harrier Jet has an abominable safety record.
Airplanes like the Moller Skycar are technically feasible, but practically useless. This aircraft uses 8 wankel rotary engines driving four ducted fans, with a sophisticated computer-controlled fly-by-wire system to keep it stable. Yet Moller says it can be sold for $80,000, when a Cessna 172 currently sells for $130,000, and has only one engine and a simple propeller (no computer).
A new aircraft design, even a very simple one based on currently accepted practices, takes years and millions of dollars to get through government certification. The Moller Skycar is a collection of uncertified components, many of which are totally unproven, and any of which could bring the airplane down if it failed.
The ducted fans on the Skycar are only a few inches off the ground - a surefire way to suck FOD into the fans and destroy them. This one little detail could prevent certification, and there are hundreds of such ‘details’ in this aircraft (which, by the way, after over a decade of development has not even flown).
Most of the radical ‘dream’ aircraft out there suffer from similar problems. A lot of very smart people have been designing airplanes for decades, and if hydrogen peroxide was a good fuel for airplanes someone would be using it. Etc.
There are some genuine breakthroughs on the horizon that promise to make light aircraft cheaper, faster, and safer. NASA has a small gas turbine engine program that may get us a truly inexpensive jet engine for general aviation. That would be revolutionary. Burt Rutan has led several revolutions including composite aircraft structures, which has led to new planes like the Cirrus SR-20 which is much faster and more fuel efficient than other airplanes. But these kinds of improvements are incremental. There are good reasons why you don’t see radical, overnight changes in the way we fly.