Support for LAist comes from
Local and national news, NPR, things to do, food recommendations and guides to Los Angeles, Orange County and the Inland Empire
Stay Connected
Listen
Podcasts AirTalk
There's A New Push To Put The Brakes On LA's Rising Speed Limits
solid blue rectangular banner
()
AirTalk Tile 2024
This is an archival story that predates current editorial management.

This archival content was originally written for and published on KPCC.org. Keep in mind that links and images may no longer work — and references may be outdated.

Feb 11, 2020
Listen 17:56
There's A New Push To Put The Brakes On LA's Rising Speed Limits
Years of research, the rules of physics and common sense all point to an established fact about street safety: the faster people drive, the more dangerous and deadly our roads become.
Los Angeles city street
Los Angeles city street
(
(Courtesy Los Angeles Department of Transportation)
)

Years of research, the rules of physics and common sense all point to an established fact about street safety: the faster people drive, the more dangerous and deadly our roads become.

Years of research, the rules of physics and common sense all point to an established fact about street safety: the faster people drive, the more dangerous and deadly our roads become.

Despite that fact, Los Angeles and other cities across California are regularly raising speed limits on their streets. They're doing that in order to enforce speeding laws in accordance with something called the 85th percentile rule, which roughly says if enough people are driving a certain speed, that should be the speed limit. If that seems like a counterintuitive and incredibly flawed process to make streets safer, a broad coalition of public safety agencies, advocates and lawmakers across the state agrees. And now a new bill introduced in Sacramento aims to give cities more control over how they set and manage speed limits. Today on AirTalk, we look at the pros and cons of the bill and what it could mean for local municipalities. 

Read the full story from LAist here.

Guests:

Ribeka Toda, transportation engineer working in Los Angeles; she was on the advisory group that provided input to California’s  Zero Traffic Fatalities Task Force 

Chad Dornsife, executive director of the Best Highway Safety Practices Institute, a non-profit based in Portland, Oregon; he is a spokesperson for the National Motorists Association on the traffic engineering safety 

Credits
Host, AirTalk
Host, All Things Considered, AirTalk Friday
Senior Producer, AirTalk & FilmWeek
Producer, AirTalk with Larry Mantle
Producer, AirTalk with Larry Mantle
Associate Producer, AirTalk with Larry Mantle
Apprentice News Clerk, AirTalk
Apprentice News Clerk, FilmWeek