First Posted: 3/21/2015
TOLEDO (AP) — Shifting to a 75 mph speed limit would put Ohio in the fast lane among states in the eastern United States.
Only one state entirely east of the Mississippi River — Maine — is among the 16 around the nation with at least a 75 mph speed limit. The others are all connected and stretch from Louisiana and Arizona to North Dakota and Idaho.
A committee of lawmakers from the Ohio House and Senate will be deciding in the coming weeks whether to increase the speed limit from 70 to 75 for all trucks and cars on the Ohio Turnpike and rural interstate highways. Gov. John Kasich would need to sign off on the idea too.
The state Senate this past week approved the speed limit increase with little debate, but House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger said there were questions about whether it’s too soon.
It would be the second time in less than two years that Ohio’s speed limit has gone up.
The speed limit was bumped from 65 to 70 mph in the middle of 2013 on some rural sections of interstate highways while the turnpike that crosses northern Ohio switched to a 70 mph limit two years before that.
The State Highway Patrol hasn’t taken a position on whether it thinks it would be wise to raise the speed limit again.
Sgt. Vincent Shirey, a patrol spokesman, said the agency typically would like to see at least two years of traffic and accident data before determining the impact of the higher speed limits. Looking at traffic data from only one year to the next could be skewed by a rough winter or highway construction, he said.
Still, the numbers show a substantial increase in both injury crashes and property damage crashes when comparing the 18 months before and after the speed limit rose to 70 mph.
Injury crashes jumped by 17 percent and property damage crashes were up 12 percent, according to the date released by the patrol.
Senate President Keith Faber, a Celina Republican, said lawmakers are looking at the numbers, but he said he believed it was too short of a period to draw any substantive conclusions.
“I think drivers need to be concerned not what the maximum is, but what the conditions are that are supported at the time,” he said. “Cars are safer, roads are better. The question is what should the speed be, particularly in the rural, non-congested region of the state.”
