The Texas Department of Transportation said today a toll road being built from San Antonio to north of Austin could be the first road in the country to have a posted 85 mile per hour speed limit.
"It was designed under extremely high design parameters," said Darren McDaniel, the Speed Management Director for the department, which builds and manages all Texas highways.
The highway, called State Highway 130, is being built to take traffic loads off of the heavily overcrowded Interstate 35 between San Antonio and north of Austin, a stretch which is one of the most congested in the country. Most of the highway is built, and posted at 80 miles per hour, and the remainder is set to be opened before the end of this year.
"We'll definitely take a look at that stretch, and we will conduct speed studies to see what that speed limit will be," he said.
The Texas Legislature last year passed a law that allowed speed limits of up to 85 miles per hour on newly constructed highways which were determined to be safe enough to allow that speed.
Currently, Texas and Utah are the only two states which allow speed limits of 80 miles per hour, and the 85 mile an hour speed limit would be the fastest in the Western Hemisphere and the second highest in the world, according to Rhino Car Hire, a European car rental company. It says a speed of 140 kilometers per hour, or about 86 mph, is posted on some roads in Poland.
Critics say higher speed limits will lead to more fatal accidents, but McDaniel says the safest roads are the roads where all motorists are traveling the same speed.
"The more people we can get to travel a uniform speed, the safer are the conditions that will exist," he told 1200 WOAI's Michael Board.
Texas currently allows motorists to travel 80 miles per hour on Interstates 10 and 20 in far west Texas. State Highway 130 runs through a more populated area, but it is new and relatively free of cars, and officials hope posting 85 mile an hour speed limits will attract more motorists to the toll road, lessening congestion on the Interstate.
