Engineering360: "Study: Car Crashes Increase When Speed Limits Lowered Beyond Engineering Recommendations"

If you didn't do a little research, you might think that 50 or 55 mph was a common highway speed in Montana, cited in the article by the author.

When in actuality, the common highway speed is 65 mph to 75mph, with some roads having an 80mph limit.

Which means that everything spoken about in the story is skewed.

Luckily this is cr4 and they have the opportunity to redact the story and come back with a new article with facts, figures and numbers closer to reality.

Americans and cars. I always enjoyed the Taxi tail light debacle. In the early 80's a NYC cab company started putting a third taillight on their cabs above the rear window. This reduced the number of rear-enders they had substantially. By the mid eighties this information had been enacted into law and all cars had to have them. The initial results tracked with the cab companies, but then as more and more of them hit the roads, the rear end accident rate went back up.

Two very specific reasons for this.

1. They were no longer unusual and therefore people had become as blind to them just as they are to the other lights on your car.

2. SUV's. A third light is useless if you can't see it and road awareness is reduced to the bumper of the vision block in front of you. Your reaction time becomes their reaction time plus your response delay. By the end of the 90's rear end accidents were right back to where they had been heading percentage wise before the third light.