In 1974, Congress imposed a 55 MPH speed limit on the entire country. Everyone ignored it. And it actually made roads more dangerous. Our new Short explains America’s love affair with speeding.

Americans have the need for speed. According to AAA, nearly half of drivers admit to going at least 15 MPH over the speed limit on freeways. And there’s a long history of this kind of defiance. In 1974, Congress imposed a 55 MPH speed limit on the entire country. (Though it wasn’t necessarily about safety.) The law came in the wake of the OPEC oil embargo and was primarily intended to conserve gas. And the thing about the 55 MPH speed limit was … everyone ignored it. Traffic engineers say the ideal limit is the speed at or below which 85% of traffic is driving. And in many places that was way over 55 MPH. In Oklahoma, for instance, engineers would have recommended a speed limit of 75 MPH. And setting it at 55 actually increased accidents … because drivers were traveling at so many different speeds that it created chaos. In the 1990s, Congress repealed these restrictions and gave power back to the states … which led to wildly different approaches. For the first few years after the repeal, Montana had no daytime speed limit at all. Today, the country’s highest speed limit can be found in parts of Texas, where it’s 85 MPH. Meanwhile, 11 states and Washington D.C. still have 55 MPH limits on their urban interstates. Not that Americans are paying that much attention anyway. While no one’s quite sure what the worst example of speeding in American history was … in 2004, Minnesota police pulled over a man on a motorcycle going 205 MPH. (The speed limit was 65.)

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