PORTLAND, Ore., July 8 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Reenacting the failed 1974 National Maximum Speed Law is not a solution. The solution is to properly engineer our roadways to facilitate the optimum flow of traffic, a prescription that would reduce our total vehicular carbon footprint and improve roadway safety. The future is in educating motorists to drive safely via safety campaigns that promote keep right except to pass, yielding, courtesy, and safety practices that are based in fact! Programs that create jobs, reduce our carbon footprint, pollution, and improve the safety and efficiency of our infrastructure.
Civil engineering solutions can help the energy crisis by focusing on:
* Surface streets and parking lots; where the majority of our fuel consumption, pollution and accidents occur.
* Reducing time spent idling, stopping, starting, changing speed, hazards, flow conflicts, cross traffic movements while adopting stronger user and access management plans.
* Utilizing traffic circles that reduce accidents by more than 70 percent, fatalities by more than 90 percent, and fuel consumption, pollution, travel times and overall roadway speeds.
* Promoting better driving habits, such as taking the time to rest if you're tired and yielding the right-of-way, etc. which improves the flow of traffic.
* Eliminating traffic flow impeding passive aggressive drivers, hypermilers, and fleet vehicles with speed governors that are set below the natural flow of traffic.
* Slow drivers, flow friction and chaos, longer hours of driving to reach a destination, fatigue, sleep deficit, poor roadway design and roadside hazards.
* Roadway design and environment determines the speed of traffic, not the sign.
* The total carbon footprint, which includes how a policy potentially impacts productivity and its unintended consequences, such as increases in miles driven to accomplish uncompleted task, extra days of energy use for services, hotels, restaurants, etc.
Regardless of any act by a Governor or Congress, higher fuel prices will bring the following results:
* Billions of fewer miles will be driven, with significant reductions in high risk discretionary driving and lesser rear end collisions, too.
* 2008 highway fatalities and accidents, in total and per motorist mile, will be significantly below all time lows.
* Reduced traffic volumes will allow more efficient traffic flows, reducing accidents and fuel consumption.
* Public officials are already erroneously attributing all-the-above for the success of their program de jure, as justification to further increase automated citations, fines, fees, regulations, more programs and justifications to make traffic stops, the elimination of due process and lower (zero tolerance) enforcement thresholds.
* Adding to the 60,000,000 citations they write now and the premium surcharges that are based on otherwise safe driving according to the Federal Highway Administration.
What can "We the People" do to reduce fuel use and improve safety? Go with the flow, be courteous, and have your community evaluate what it can do to improve traffic flows, reduce conflicts, and promote safety. And when you're on a highway, stay right except to pass, and demand our public safety practices be based on fact!
The Best Highway Safety Practices Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing best highway safety practices. The Institute was founded in 2004, in Portland, Oregon by professionals who specialize in highway safety issues. The Institute focuses on education, research, best practices and their application, and assuring public policy is founded in best practice.
CONTACT: Chad Dornsife, +1-858-673-1926, or Jeffrey Boly, +1-503-223-5447
Web site: http://www.bhspi.org/
NOTE TO EDITORS: For more information details of any statements made, or if you need an opinion on a particular matter email us at info@bhspi.org