If men were meant to travel at the speed of light, cars would have to fly

If a man was supposed to be able to travel as fast as light he would either be flying in his car or ride a beam of sunlight like a ram jet on steroids.

The way I see it, people have cars and such that are designed to get us from point A to point B and back again but in one piece, not wrapped tightly around a street light.

Cars are made to go over 100 miles per hour. There are no speed limit signs out there on the highway that say, Hey buddy, drive faster. 90 miles per hour isn’t fast enough!

You have to give the auto manufacturers credit for knowing human nature. They deliberately made the internal combustion engine to take man faster than a flying squirrel to the point he will lose contact with the ground. Have you ever seen a car go so fast that it actually elevates above the surface of the road as if trying to take off like a jet plane?

The purpose of getting around should be limited to man’s ability to properly maintain safe and constant control of his driving. There are limits to how safe it is as far as speed on the roads is concerned. It would be impossible to turn back the clock of time and design a car that only takes you from place to place at around 20 mph. It would be so slow that at that speed the local milk man would have buttermilk before he reached the next town on his daily rounds.

But how fast is too fast? Who decides what speed limits are the right speed limits to insure the overall safety of motorists as well as bystanders on America’s highways and byways?

I live by a street that has more traffic in a day than the general population of this city. When I hear them zoom by I can usually manage to venture a good guess as to their speed. The average speed of motorists on this road is about 45 mph. But there are some who actually go slower and a few that go much faster.

The fastest I have seen or heard a vehicle travel on the road in front of our house is approximately 75 mph. It is a wonder mostly they do not wreck into a pole of some kind.

When the police and other emergency vehicles travel down this road they sometimes travel in excess of 90 mph. They really do fly.

In an attempt to satisfy people’s need for speed the City of Dallas has actually increased inner city freeway traffic speeds to up to 75 mph in some cases when I can still recall those t.v. commercials I used to hear almost daily as going something like this: “Stay alive, drive 55!”

But even 55 miles per hour doesn’t seem to work because the nature of people is such that being in heavy traffic, especially freeway traffic, when rush hour happens, it’s so slow that by the time a driver gets off the freeway, going 40 miles per hour on a main road feels like being on the autobahn in Germany so the perception of highway speed versus regular street speeds gets distorted and often times more often than not, people tend to drive faster on the regular streets when they have been a while on the inner city freeways.

This is dangerous because most traffic accidents are primarily due to excessive speeds.

I can’t emphasize enough the importance of driving safely by obeying the speed limit and warning signs on roads especially on the ones you are unfamiliar with. If you drive right at the speed limit and the flow of traffic is passing all around you try to just stay in the right lane, the slow lane and let them pass. You will get home in one piece. It’s they who are driving too fast and it’s they not you who will get the ticket for driving too fast not you but going under the speed limit can also be dangerous so do not do that especially on the freeway.

Just because the automobile is made to go faster than the maximum speed limit set by the Department of Transportation and Safety doesn’t imply you should be going that fast. Stay within the limits and you will be better off in the long run.