Back to 55?(National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released analysis abou speed litmit)

WHEN recounting the greatest advances for freedom enacted by the Republican-controlled Congress over the past decade, conservatives often overlook the abolition of the 55 mile-per-hour speed limit on federal highways. Enacted back in 1974, "double nickel" (as it was called) was supposed to save both oil and lives. It saved neither, and it may have been the most openly disobeyed and detested law in America since Prohibition. In 1995, Republicans in Congress let the states establish their own speed limits and motorists have been thankful since.

Now, as Congress finishes up work on the 2005 highway bill, some nanny-state interest groups want to reestablish a national speed limit. And these groups continue to agitate for lower state limits. In 2003 the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety issued a study proclaiming that the number of deaths on rural highways had risen by 35 percent because of the law that allowed states to raise speed limits above 55 mph. Higher speed limits in states are said to be the cause of more than 1,000 additional highway fatalities a year.

But hold on. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration just released an analysis finding that in 2003 death rates on highways were the lowest ever recorded. In that year the fatality rate was 1.43 per 100 million miles traveled.

Death rates have steadily declined, with the sole ...