(The Center Square) – A state legislator wants to eliminate specific daytime speed limits on Arizona’s rural interstates.
House Bill 2059, also known as the Reasonable and Prudent Interstate Driving (RAPID) Act, is from state Rep. Nick Kupper, R-Surprise. Kupper’s legislation would enable the Arizona Department of Transportation to authorize de-restricted speed zones for non-commercial vehicles during the daytime on qualifying rural interstate highways.
Under the bill, there would be no speed limit during the daytime. Instead, the bill says, “A person shall not drive a vehicle on a highway at a speed greater than is reasonable and prudent” with attention paid to road conditions and hazards.
At night, a maximum speed limit of 80 mph would be in place.
Meanwhile, Arizona’s Department of Public Safety would have a public education effort to help drivers be aware of and understand things such as lane discipline and passing rules before entering a zone.
Kupper said the purpose of his bill is to decrease fatalities on the road.
“An initial pilot program would be applied on Interstate 8 in the segment that would be chosen by the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) director,” Kupper told The Center Square. “If the pilot program goes well, it could expand to other rural highways or interstates so long as they meet all the other qualifying factors in the bill, such as they meet the interstate standards, their safety profile is better over the average of the last five years than the rest of the highways on average in the state, things like that.”
Pointing to Montana, where the state instituted no-speed zones for a few years in the mid-1990s, Kupper said officials were finding two to three times fewer fatalities per vehicle mile traveled than in their speed zones.
“Germany, which has done the Autobahn for 90 years now, in their no speed zones, they’ve seen the same thing,” said Kupper, whose district includes portions of Maricopa, Yuma and La Paz counties.
When asked what reaction has been like to his bill, Kupper described it as “a mixed bag.” There are people who support the idea, and people who criticized the idea.
“The majority of support that I’ve gotten have been from traffic engineers and the like who say, ‘I’m glad you filed the bill, I’ve been looking at this for decades, this is something we should have been doing for a long time,’” said Kupper. “The people who tend to say ‘Oh, this is a horrible idea, you’re going to cause more deaths,’ for one, they very much tend to not realize it’s only in rural areas. They tend to think of downtown Phoenix. That’s not where it’s going to apply.”
Kupper also estimated that “probably 99.5% of Arizona drivers have never driven in a no-speed zone,” such as the Autobahn.
“They don’t understand how it works,” said Kupper.
Prior to 1974, Montana had a speed limit of “reasonable and prudent.” That went away for 20 years while the national 55 mph speed limit was enforced. When the national limit was eliminated, Montana went back to what it called the “reasonable and prudent” speed limit in 1995. Things stayed that way until 1998 when cattleman Rudy Stanko appealed a guilty verdict for failing to drive in a reasonable and prudent manner. Stanko argued the law was vague, and his conviction was overturned.
In 1999, Montana instituted a 75-mph speed limit. Since that time, highway fatalities have increased in Montana.
