55-MPH LIMIT HAS OUTLASTED ITS USEFULNESS

Congress may soon liberate millions of American drivers who are tired of creeping along at 55 mph on roads designed for 65 mph or more.

Despite continued whining by self-appointed safety advocates that higher speeds will increase the carnage on U.S. highways, a measure already has passed the Senate to repeal the National Maximum Speed Limit, a bureaucratic nightmare that for years made it illegal for drivers to exceed 55 mph anywhere in the country.

The law, passed in 1974, deprived states of their historic right to set speed limits within their own borders based on their particular needs and conditions. Especially upset were drivers in Nevada, which for years had not posted speed limit, and other western states with thousands of miles of lonely roads connecting sparsely populated towns.

Hailed as a fuel-saving measure during the Carter administration's energy crisis, the 55 mph speed limit should have died when President Reagan deregulated the energy industry in 1981 and the long lines disappeared at service stations.

Faced with the loss of some of their powers, federal bureaucrats changed tactics and decided that the 55 mph speed limit was really a highway safety measure. So Congress kept it. In the years following, America's drivers voted with their feet and made the limit one of the most widely ignored federal laws ever enacted.

Bowing to public demand, Congress grudgingly decided in 1987 to let states raise the limit to 65 mph, but only on rural interstates. Thousand more people would die because of the higher speed limit, the safety advocates predicted.

Today, as Congress considers repealing the federal speed limit, we hear the same dire predictions. Jacqueline Gillan of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety predicted "more than 5,000 additional deaths and millions more injuries on our highways."

Such a prediction shows how hocus-pocus statistics can be used to create unjustified public fears in order to protect the power and turf of entrenched Washington bureaucrats.

In fact, fewer people have died on rural interstates after 1987 than before, according to Charles Lave, chairman of the University of California's economics department, in a study for the American Automobile Association's Traffic Safety Foundation and the University of California Transportation Center.

Jim Baxter, president of the National Motorists Association, cites a 1992 study for the U.S. Department of Transportation that found the accident rate went up 5.4 percent in places were speed limits were lowered and fell 6.7 percent where they were raised.

If the House and Senate agree on repealing the national limit and it isn't vetoed by President Clinton, some states undoubtedly will raise their speed limits. Other states won't. In both cases, America's drivers will, for the first time in 20 years, be able to watch the road ahead for safety traps instead of radar traps.

Edwin Feulner is president of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C., public policy research institute.