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Jay that is going too slow on the freeway is dangerous. What about going way too fast?
Well, you know our freeways, the controlled access highways. The US interstate highway system is actually built on the same model as the German autobonds. So if you're a fairly competent driver and you're not weaving in and out of traffic, you can go reasonable speed.
I mean, look at.
The speed limits around the country. In Utah, the same highway is eighty miles an hour as a speed limit, and in other parts of the country the exact same design of a highway is sometimes fifty five miles an hour or fifty or sixty miles an hour. So the speed limits on our highways are pretty arbitrary with regards to the jurisdiction that you're driving through. And so what we recommend in terms of how we set speed limits
is something called the eighty fifth percentile speed. That's the speed that eighty five percent of the people don't exceed. It's the natural speed that everybody sort of congregates on the roadway. So the most dangerous thing actually is speed variation that is, some people going much faster, some people
going much slower. But if everybody's going about the same speed, that's been proven to be the most safe thing, even if that's a little faster than say what somebody arbitrarily stuck a speed limit on that particular roadway.
For There's nothing worse though than a driver doing forty on the freeway right exactly.
Yeah, And it's even worse if they're stuck in the left lane and refuse to move over. The National Motors Association one of the things we do in most years is we have what we call Lane Courtesy Month, and we try to encourage people, you know, stay to the right, pass left, and leave that left lane open for the people that want to drive a reasonable speed on the roadway.
Now, some states have a high speed lane, but you have to have more than one person in the car. Is that happening throughout the country.
Yeah, Well, what they're doing is they have they have carpool lanes that has been proven not to be very successful. But what they're starting to do now is they're starting to have these lanes in which you have to pay to be in those lanes. There's nothing wrong with building a lane in which you have to pay for. If that's an extra lane. The problem would be is if they took away a lane that we've already paid for with our tax dollars and then made that uh and
a lane in which you had to pay for. So so it depends on whether or not you know how how you built the lane, and how you how you've used that money, and whether you've used new money for that and added to capacity. But what we're seeing around the country is what they really want to do is they want to reduce capacity to have this thing called
road diets. And I don't if anybody's heard that before, but what that basically means is they want to take away car lanes because there's too much car lane you're going, you know, it's too easy for you to get around, So they want to take away car lanes. And this is happening in a lot of cities. Los Angeles and New York City has done this, you know, a lot of major cities and sometimes in smaller places around the country, and it can lead to some very very dangerous things
that have happened. You probably have covered on your show the fire up in Paradise, California, when that happened. And one of the things that happened there A lot of people don't know this is that they did a road diet in the middle of town on that roadway, after they were told that the route out of town was
already not safe. What they did was they took away a car lane and a number of people I think it was eighty somewhi people lost their lives in that, and part of that was because people couldn't get out and you know, in an area, in a mountainous area where there was only one route out and they took a car lane. And unfortunately, that's what some of this ideology leads to, leads to things that are much less safe, not more safe.
Jade, does your organization ever look at road rage?
You know, it is something that we don't spend a lot of time on, but it is it's an interesting question. A lot of what's happening with road rage nowadays, I think is people are very frustrated by the policies that are making their commutes and their ability to get around much more difficult. So they're stuck in traffic for no reason. They're frustrated by that. But of course we certainly can't condone anybody doing anything dangerous on the roadway or being
unsafe to other people on the roadway. We think people need to be courteous. That's why we promote the lane courtesy and you know, people need to get along and you know, but people also need to be courteous. So you know, if somebody wants to go a little faster, then you get out of their way, don't don't try to block them in intentionally.
And I'm convinced road rage occurs when a bad driver or in consider a driver does something to a person who's having a bad day.
Yeah, that's definitely, that's definitely what leads to this kind of thing. I mean, certainly, I think just everything in our society now is a little bit too close to the boiling point. So we really knew need to kind of take a step back just overall. But we tend to, and this is more of a psychological thing, that we tend to ascribe bad motives to people when that may
not be their intention. You know that guy cut me off, Well, maybe he just didn't see you, or he wasn't paying attention, or he's having a bad day.
Or he made a mistake.
A little bit of grace. Yeah, maybe just made a mistake, you know, I you know, I accidentally, you know, a couple of weeks ago, I actually made a mistake and and you know, unfortunately I didn't quite cut somebody off, but somebody got mad at something that I did on the roadway and they, you know, they came after me and driving like a maniac. That's not going to get you anywhere. That's not going to help you. You're going
to hurt somebody. Don't do that, you know, just just let it go and and and don't be you know, don't don't don't put more people in danger because you know, you you you know, you can't just sort of say, well, you know, maybe that person's having a bad day, or maybe that person just made a mistake. They weren't intending it towards me. Everybody takes things a little too personally these days, and we need to we need to have a little bit more grace to people.
I think I tried to go out of my way to help people. Somebody's trying to cut into traffic and they're stuck on the side, I'll slow down, let them go in. Or somebody do this where they put their turn signal on to change lanes. Nobody lets them in. I'll let them in.
Yeah, I do the same thing because you know what, here's the thing. I want to treat people the way I would like to be treated on the roadway. That's one of the things that we promote in our organization is this sort of the golden rule, and you know, treat people the way you want to be treated on the roadway. Be courteous. If somebody's trying to merge, let
them merge. It's only one car in front of you, don't you know, don't be a jerk about it, you know, and just you know, just just be nice to people will all get along. We'll all get there much more safely and get there, you know, in a reasonable amount
of time. It's the things that we fight about are the are the unfair policies that the government is imposing on us, which which leads to a lot of these behaviors because people are already frustrated because the government intentionally is creating traffic congestion unfortunately, and that's going to make people a lot more angry because they sometimes have to be somewhere and they can't get there because somebody, you know, some government official decided it was better for you to
be on a bus, and they want to make your commuteity a lot more difficult.
Jay, My mother is ninety five, lives in Detroit and still drives, and she was bragging today about how she drives. And I said, Mom, if I'm ever in Detroit and you're on the road, I'm getting off.
But you know, my mom is ninety one and she still drives, so I'm thankful I still have her around.
Does she do freeways. I don't think mine does freeways.
She tries to stay away from some of the higher speed roadways. And she, you know, at ninety one, she doesn't drive as far as she used to, but she you know, she still goes to the grocery store. She still gets around, as you know, go to her doctor's appointments, but certainly doesn't take those long trips that we used to take when I was child, That's for sure.
What's going on with these bike lanes or these bikes, you pedal bikes that are in the middle of the road.
Yeah, you know, this is an interesting phenomenon. There is this push to have everybody be on a bicycle, and there is unfortunately a very militant, small, small, small part of our population that identifies as bicyclists. They see it as their identity, and they want everybody to be on a bicycle, and they want the roadways tore themselves. Now they'll say, oh, we just want to share the roadway, but what they want is at least half of the roadway.
And if you look at the amount of people that use bicycles to get around to commute, it's very small. It just saw a statistic from the Washington Post and it said that the percent of US commuters who usually make a trip by bike commuting is a half a percent. Now it's bigger in some areas like Manhattan and some other areas, but overall in the US, it's a half a percent. It is basically the same in twenty nineteen as well, you know, before the pandemic, as it is now,
and it's actually down from twenty fourteen. But what they're doing is they're taking away car lanes in order to give it over to bike lanes. And my wife and I have this joke whenever we do see the rare occasion we see a bicyclist actually in a bike lane, will say, oh, they're just a unicorns. They're so rare that we rarely ever received them.
You know.
They say, well, if you build it, they will come. Well, unfortunately, they have spent billions of dollars around the country building out bike lanes, and the amount of bicycling has barely moved. It's barely moved, and it will never reach the amount that people drive by personal automobile, which is in close to eighty percent of people get around by personal automobile.
And what's actually increasing, not just because of the pandemic, because this was happening before the pandemic, is that people working from home is way way before the pandemic, way out numbered the people that were traveling around by bicycles. And so we're never going to get people to switch to bicycles as a major form of transportation in this country.
And it's a fool's errand and we're making a lot of people miserable or making a lot of people or because of it, and it's it's really a bad idea. And that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be bike lanes here and there, or there are, there shouldn't be places for people to bike if they need to, but the amount of bike lanes that they're putting in in places in taking away car lanes as a result, is a very very very poor policy.
And some of these bikers don't have reflectors or lights on their bikes, and they're pedaling in the pitch darkness.
Yes. In fact, the satistics, the statistics show that the vast majority of pedestrian and bicyclists collisions and fatality occur in the dark because people can't see them, can't see them, unfortunately, I'm sorry, good.
No, you're right, you can't see them.
Yeah, exactly. And unfortunately there are you know, a set of bicyclists who don't want to follow the rules of the road. They don't think the rules of the road apply to them, so they'll blow through a stop sign, or you know, they'll blow through a traffic light, or they'll right on the wrong side of the road or
cut in and out of traffic. Seeing this all the time, you know, but god forbid a driver in a car slowly rolls through a stop sign when nobody's around, you know, they they they lose their minds because of this, and so they're they're really inconsistent and really hypocritical about this. So the rules don't apply to them, but you know, everybody else has to follow the law exactly to the absolute letter of the law. And again going back to what we were saying before, no grace for anybody else.
Everybody else is at your but you're perfect. That seems to be their attitude.
Tell me you hate self driving cars and trucks because I knew.
Yeah, you know, there there are could be some benefits from that. You know, you're you're you're your mom my mom. You know, maybe you know, maybe a self driving car is appropriate for them to get around. But the thing we're concerned about self driving cars is the amount of control that the government potentially could have over our lives if, for ale, they decided to force everybody into a self driving car in the same way they want to force
everybody into an electric vehicle. And what I mean by this is that the that no manufacturer will will build a self driving car that breaks the law. They can't. It's it's by its very nature, so it's much easier to control the machine than it is to control the human being. So all they have to do is pass some ridiculous law and then everybody, you know, that car has to follow it. The human being inside that car will have no control over it, and I don't know.
Let's say, I know, some crazy thing happens, like a pandemic, and they decide everybody needs to stay home, or nobody can go to work and nobody can go to a certain partner.
To us, they never happen.
I know they would never happen. But in the case that it did, if all of our cars were self driving cars, all they would have to do is pass that law or pass that rule. Not even a law, They probably just have to pass the rule and the car will have to follow it because the manufacturer of that car that makes the software for that, they will
get in trouble if that car doesn't follow it. So that's the concern we have is is you know how much freedom will you have left when that car is controlled by the government and that car is controlled by some giant tech company that may not like where you're going and decides, you know what, we're not going to take you there in our in our self driving car because we don't agree with your life choices.
Or we're going to just simply shut the car down for a week and it won't move exactly.
And that's another thing that they want to do. They want they there is in the bipartisan Infrastructure bill that passed a couple of years ago, there is a mandate for the government to come up with a plan for now we call it a kill switch. They you know, they say it's for impaired driving, but of course it never stops at what they say that it's for. And so they want to have this switch in the car that the car, either automatically or remotely can be shut off.
And think about how dangerous that would be if the car makes a mistake. I mean, you've been you've been reporting, you know, over the last day or so on this CrowdStrike thing that this Microsoft thing, and just I mean technology is not perfect, okay, so they're always going to
be false positive. So somebody gets in a car and you know, maybe somebody else is in the car who's impaired or whatever, and that car won will you will not be able to go where you need to go because the car mistakenly thinks that the driver is impaired, or while your car is driving and you're in the middle of nowhere, you know, think if you're you know, a lone woman out there and the car makes a
mistake and now you're stranded somewhere. I mean, this is really dangerous technology that is not ripe for prime time, and we're very concerned about the fact that they're mandating that in twenty twenty five, twenty twenty six, they're supposed to have these rules and this technology does not exist properly yet. Even if it did, it wouldn't be a good idea. But we're very concerned about this, and we've
been talking to Congress. Is one of the things that the National Motor Association does is we do talk to elected officials a lot, and we try to convince them and explain to them what the problems are for some of these ideas that sound good on paper, but when you get into the details of it, they're not a good idea, and there are oftentimes very
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