Toward Greater Understanding of the Relationship between Public Perceptions of Speed, Speed Laws, and Safety

Douma, Frank; Alarcon, Frank · 2018 · ROSA P / Roadway Safety Institute

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Summary

This report investigates the disconnect between the persistent safety risks of speeding and the trend of states adopting more lenient speed laws. Speeding contributed to over 9,500 traffic fatalities in the U.S. in 2015, yet some states have raised speed limits and weakened enforcement. The authors attribute this contradiction to a "public choice problem": voters often lack awareness of the dangers of permissive speed laws and do not demand strict enforcement from elected officials. Consequently, politicians, motivated by electoral incentives and lobbying for mobility over safety, implement regimes that fail to deter unsafe driving. The study aims to determine if a relationship exists between state speed laws, roadway fatality rates, and public perceptions of speed. The researchers focused on the six states comprising U.S. Department of Transportation Region 5: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. They analyzed three bodies of data: state speed laws, crash and fatality statistics, and public perception surveys. To compare legal frameworks, the authors adapted a ranking methodology from a WalletHub report, scoring states based on criteria such as reckless driving definitions, automated speed enforcement (ASE) allowances, and fine structures. They also examined 2015 fatality rates per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and reviewed available survey data on driver attitudes from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The analysis revealed significant inconsistencies in data quality that prevented definitive conclusions. The legal ranking indicated Illinois had the strongest speed enforcement regime, while Minnesota had the lowest fatality rate (0.68 per 100 million VMT), despite having a weaker legal ranking than Illinois. Public perception surveys showed that while drivers acknowledge speeding as a problem, many admit to speeding regularly and express satisfaction with current enforcement levels. The authors found that existing data on crash reporting and public attitudes lacked the standardization necessary for rigorous cross-state comparison. The report concludes that better data are required to dismantle the public choice problem and establish effective speed enforcement. The authors recommend four specific actions: greater coordination among states to produce uniform speed laws; the development of a nationally accepted method for measuring the certainty of punishment for speed violations; the adoption of a standard method for reporting speed-related crashes and fatalities; and the deployment of a regular national survey to measure public attitudes toward speed. Implementing these recommendations would facilitate cross-state comparisons, allowing researchers to identify gaps in public knowledge and legal weaknesses, thereby enabling the establishment of more effective safety regimes.

Key finding

The study concludes that current data on speed laws, crash statistics, and public perceptions are insufficiently standardized to determine a definitive relationship between state speed enforcement quality and roadway fatality rates.

Methodology

dataset

Provenance

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Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

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• speed choice
• speed management
• traffic safety culture
• regulatory evaluation
• comparative international

Information type

What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).

• Applied Guidance: policy recommendations
• Empirical Findings: observational prevalence, crash risk outcomes