On Route to Safe Material Handling
Letting people rush around as fast as they want seemed like a recipe for an increase in both the number and severity of car crashes.
Periodically, someone will float a proposal to remove speed limits from American highways. The critical response is predictably skeptical, with pundits suggesting that a highway without speed limits is a disaster waiting to happen, and the proposal is effectively squashed. In many ways, the skepticism makes sense. We know that drivers have limited reaction times, and the faster people drive, the longer it will take them to stop. Letting people rush around as fast as they want seemed like a recipe for an increase in both the number and severity of car crashes.
But take a look at a highway without speed limits, and you will be surprised to see that the predicted rise in road incidents may not be as much of a certainty as some may think. Perhaps the most famous example is the autobahn, Germany’s superhighway and one of the world’s few motorways without a universal speed limit. When you peek under the hood, the autobahn highway reveals some fundamental truths about the dangers of rushing and the structural nature of safety, especially when it comes to material handling.
The
Start of the Autobahn
The autobahn is a system of highways not dissimilar to interstate highways in the United States. It is almost as old too, with the construction planning on the German highway system beginning in the 1920s. Despite a common misperception, the autobahn does have speed limits but that was not always the case.
In the early 1950s, the West German government removed speed limits on all roads, including: highways, city streets and everything in between. This was a short-lived experiment and, after five years, the sharp increase in traffic collisions led to a return of speed limits in urban areas. As any safety expert will tell you, let people do what they want with no restrictions and incidents are bound to pile up. Still, while speed limits were reintroduced in many areas, the autobahn remained free of speed limits.
Well, almost free of speed limits. These days, nearly one third of the autobahn has some sort of restriction on how fast you can drive. In some cases, it is because a stretch of highway passes by a city or a construction zone. In other instances, speed limits may temporarily take effect because of inclement weather and other poor driving conditions.
However, on 70 percent of the highway, you can drive as fast as you want. Some people do, with 15 percent of cars traveling over 170 km/h (105 mph). It is worth noting that there is a recommended top travel speed of 130 km/h (about 80 mph). Drivers seem to stick relatively close to that suggested speed, as one study found, the average speed of cars to be just under 142 km/h or about seven mph over the advisory speed limit.
This article originally appeared in the October 2021 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.