All across the country, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is hard at work convincing cities to lower their speed limits from 30 MPH to 25 MPH.
The national effort to lower speed limits in cities is known as “Vision-Zero.”
To date, the NHTSA, NSC and the IIHS have convinced more than thirty cities to lower their speed limits.
Last month the IIHS published a controversial report titled “Lowering the speed limit from 30 to 25 mph in Boston: effects on vehicle speeds.” (To learn more about Boston’s Vision-Zero program, click here.)
Why is it controversial?
The Newspaper, recently interviewed the National Motorists Association who pointed how the IIHS cherry-picked data to convince the public that lowering the speed limit 5 MPH saves lives.
“IIHS researchers produced the figures after gathering off-peak speed data from October through December 2016 to serve as “before” data. This was compared with data from September through November 2017, the “after” period. In Boston, the mean speed of traffic when the speed limit signs read 30 MPH was 24.8 MPH. After Boston installed 25 MPH signs, mean speeds remained 24.8 MPH. Likewise, the 85th percentile speed (the speed that the vast majority, 85 percent were traveling), remained 31 MPH. Mean speeds increased by just 0.1 MPH in the “after” period in Providence, Rhode Island, that IIHS used as a control group because the speed limits did not change in that city.”
In the report the IIHS admits that the “average and 85th percentile speeds did not change meaningfully.”
If lowering the speed limit 5 MPH doesn’t change the 85% percentile meaningfully then why do it?
As NMA Foundation executive director James C. Walker said “Only the IIHS could take those facts and claim that anything meaningful happened relative to safety or anything else.”
Why is the mainstream media silent, as cities find new ways to scam the public? Because cities and towns are cash-strapped and need to come up with novel ways to increase revenue.
Cities like Boston who have lowered their speed limit 5 MPH have seen a huge increase in speeding ticket revenue.
According The Newspaper article, Boston Police have issued 47% more speeding tickets since lowering the speed limit.
“Because the speed limit was lowered, however, “speeding” increased to 47 percent of traffic, compared to just 18 percent before the change in speed limit.’ (For more information see page 17 of the IIHS report.)
Three reasons not to trust the IIHS.
1.) Besides being an arm of the auto insurance association they regularly write pro-insurance company reports and testify before congress to further their goals.
2.) Their CEO William Windsor Jr. is an Associate Vice President of the Allstate Insurance Group and their new chairman-elect is Vice President of State Farm Insurance Companies. The list of auto insurance executives that work for the IIHS reads like a who’s who of the auto insurance world.
3.) In 2016, the IIHS admitted to secretly using facial recognition cameras to spy on motorists and passengers for three years.
Vision-Zero appears to be nothing more than a scam to pad city budgets and increase auto insurance companies profits by raising customers rates for anyone caught speeding.
https://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2018/09/bostons-vision-zero-exposed-lowering.html