This most recent round of concern about speeding on the 400-series highways may not be a full-blown "moral panic" - the term coined by London School of Economics sociologist Stanley Cohen to describe a media-fed frenzy over behaviour deemed a threat to social order.
But the latest list of horrific crashes blamed on speeding or racing has prompted the strong reaction from law-enforcement expected in moral panics, with Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Julian Fantino calling for the right to immediately seize any vehicle caught going 50 kilometres an hour over the limit.
Maybe I've been caught up in the hysteria, but that sounded to me at first like a damn good idea. However, there are other more obvious reactions to this problem, such as using technology to strictly enforce current speed limits, or even lower them, freeing up more police to chase racers and drunks. This would of course inconvenience not only the yahoos: Almost all of us break the law and speed, with the going rate on the 400-series highways, when they are moving, now averaging around 120 kilometres an hour at least.
Some traffic engineers will tell you, with the omniscient certainty they must teach in engineering school, that our speeding en masse means the highways can handle such speeds safely, and that the speed limit is artificially low. Other experts argue that speed clearly kills, and point to studies showing that highway deaths went up in U.S. states that raised speed limits in the 1990s.
More National Stories
Let's leave the safety issue aside. If you want to slow things down, you currently have another, perhaps more convincing argument: climate change. According to the federal Office of Energy Efficiency, driving the average car 100 kilometres an hour instead of 120 kilometres an hour is about 20 per cent more fuel efficient.
A 1999 Transport Canada research document on possible measures to meet the Kyoto Protocol considered reducing highway speed limits to 90 km/h - which would mean another 10-per-cent drop in emissions below 100 km/h. But it concluded this was a "more difficult" option than better enforcing current speed limits, no doubt partly due to the anticipated outcry.
Even if the government were to enforce the current limit ruthlessly, with a blanket of photo-radar cameras across every inch of the 400-series, the results would presumably be a significant cut in greenhouse gases overnight, assuming the average speed is in fact close to 120 km/h. Drop the limit to 90 km/h, using those same Draconian enforcement methods, and quick math suggests something approaching a 30-per-cent cut in emissions.
Driving 90 km/h all the time would no doubt be unbearably annoying. But even if the limit were raised to 110 km/h, and almost nobody got away with speeding any more, there would surely be a significant reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. We might see an accelerated shift to less powerful, more fuel-efficient cars, too. And the ticket revenue might make the idea a self-financing one.
This all may sound like science fiction, but governments here have slowed things down before. The current 100 km/h speed limit only dates back to 1975, when the Ontario government cut it down from 115 km/h (70 miles an hour, in those pre-metric days) during the oil crisis to conserve gas, as well as to try to limit road deaths. The U.S. did the same.
While photo radar appears to remain a politically toxic idea in Ontario today, various European jurisdictions have sold speed-limit reductions as environmental measures - and seen corresponding drops in greenhouse-gas emissions.
Sure, it would take quite a bit longer to get to the cottage, but driving more slowly must rank fairly low on the "lifestyle change" scale. It might be more palatable if a stiff carbon tax meant even speed demons were more conscious of the gas they were burning. The whole plan could be sold as a temporary measure, to be repealed on that glorious day in the sun when we are all driving zero-emissions cars.
