THE KANSAS Department of Transportation wants to increase the speed limit on U.S. Highway 56 in north Lyon County from 55 mph to 60 mph. The plan may seem like good news for all of the law-abiding drivers who find the current speed limit too restrictive, but obey it — all three of them.
If there is a speed problem on Highway 56 right now, it is not that the traffic is too slow, but that it is much too fast. Almost nobody obeys the speed limit. In good weather, 60 mph is the bottom end of the speed range observed on the highway. It does seem to be a comfortable and safe speed. The 60-mph drivers, law-breakers though they may be right now, are not the problem on the highway.
The problem is the drivers — many of them from outside the area — who look at the straight road and the light traffic and assume that they can safely push the pedal to the metal. It is not at all unusual to see a car or a big SUV with out-of-county plates rocketing along the road at 75 mph or more, taking foolish chances.
The highway may be relatively straight, but it is hilly and lacks shoulders. Speeders, frustrated by slower traffic, are often tempted to pass in no-passing zones, risking a collision with oncoming traffic (which is probably speeding, too).
The speeders also pose an additional hazard where the highway intersects with Kansas Highway 99, the Allen Road and the Americus Road and where the highway passes Northern Heights High School. Those are major intersections for county traffic. For safety, the speed limit around those intersections should be lowered, not raised.
Because 60 mph is already the consensus speed limit on Lyon County’s stretch of Highway 56, making it official might well prompt drivers to push the “unofficial” limit to 65 or 70.
Raising the speed limit could well make the highway less safe.
But there are two things that can be done to make the highway safer: increased traffic patrols to discourage the dangerous speeders and lower speed limits around those busy rural intersections.