Driving during the national 55 miles per hour speed limit


I'm watching "Cannonball Run II" on YouTube, and it's reminding me of the days when the posted speed limit on America's Highways was 55 miles per hour. By the way, the movie isn't all that great, not as good as the original, but I'm enjoying it because it lets me time-travel a bit.

I learned to drive at the time that the national speed limit had been lowered to 55, in 1974. I just Googled it, and it looks like it lasted officially until the mid-nineties, with a compromise in the late eighties in the rural areas.

It really didn't affect me, for many reasons. First of all, when I was learning to drive, in my teens, I was so timid that I rarely ever got on a freeway, and even on major streets I just poked along. I remember hearing from my mom, who was exasperated by how slowly I drove, when I was 16, or 17, to "At least drive the speed limit!" I always wondered about that.

In my college years, at Phoenix College, and ASU, I very rarely ever used a freeway. Phoenix only had one, and I enjoyed driving around the town so I was usually on the surface streets. And when I moved to Los Angeles, I also avoided the freeway, mostly because it was always so crowded, and it was actually faster to take Cahuenga than the 405. I mapped it all out with a Thomas Guide.

Of course when traffic did move on the California freeways, there really was no speed limit, you just kept up with traffic to be safe. If you've never driven LA freeways at speed, the best I can say is to watch NASCAR, and understand how tight the pack is, and how important it is to not be going too slow, or make any sudden moves. It really got to be the same in Phoenix, especially if you were going to be in the carpool lane - I once had a DPS car following me on the 10, and I was going so slow (under eighty) that he zipped into the lane around me, and passed. I was kinda surprised that he didn't flip me off. The posted speed limit, by the way, was 65.

I knew a lot of people who enjoyed speeding out on the open road, who had CB radios, and radar, and just generally made a game out of it. I really never had any interest in that, I had always wanted to drive a racing car on the track, like at Bondurant. I considered myself a motorsports person, not a boy racer. I never got a chance to drive on a track, and now I've lost interest.

OK, time for me to go back to the movie, which was made in 1984, when things like running away from the cops, high-speed chases, and drinking beer while you drive, were still considered funny. Times have changed!

If you liked this post, please buy me a coffee:

Buy Me A Coffee

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more