For Californians who dream of driving at top speeds, a new state bill could provide their fix: four speed-limit-free highway lanes, similar to Germany’s Autobahn, which would allow motorists to zoom up and down the state as fast as they want without penalty.
The plan – introduced last week by Orange County State Sen. John Moorlach (R-Costa Mesa) in State Bill 319 – would add no-speed-limit lanes to Interstate 5 and State Route 99, serving as an alternative to California’s high-speed rail project, which been plagued with delays and cost overruns.
Moorlach’s bill would add northbound and southbound lanes to both highways and would prohibit the state from implementing maximum speeds at a later date. State Route 99 runs almost the entire length of the Central Valley, from Wheeler Ridge to Red Bluff, while I-5 spans the length of the entire state, from Mexico to Oregon.
“If Sacramento is serious about allowing Californians to travel between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and high-speed rail will take too long to build, let’s construct four additional lanes with no maximum speed limit to provide for high speed on a safe road,” Moorlach said in a prepared statement.
Moorlach’s bill arrives as President Donald Trump’s administration announced on Tuesday its plan to rescind the $929 million in grant funds it allocated for California $77-billion bullet train project, which is now $44 billion over budget and 13 years behind schedule. The same day, the U.S. Department of Transportation said it was exploring legal options to take back $2.5 billion in federal funds it contributed to the high-speed rail system. The move to pull federal funds from the rail project came a day after California filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s declaration of a national emergency aimed at securing funds to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom used his Feb. 12 State of the State address to call for the high-speed rail project to be constrained to focus on opening a 170-mile segment running from Bakersfield to Merced by 2027, with possible extensions to the Bay Area and Southern California much further into the future.
State Bill 319 doesn’t call for the speed-limit-free lanes to fully supplant the bullet train project, but Moorlach’s office said it could at least provide “an expedited transportation option until a substantial High-Speed Rail segment can be built decades in the future.”
But the plan has detractors.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit that works to reduce traffic collisions and deaths, called Moorlach’s proposal “dangerous in the extreme,” noting that high speeds prevent drivers from braking quickly, increasing the likelihood of deadly collisions. Russ Rader, a spokesman for the group, said that while Germany’s Autobahn has lower death rates than U.S. highways, that has only been the case since the late 1980s when speed limits were raised on rural American interstates. Rader said traffic laws also are more strictly enforced in Europe.
“If implemented, (this bill) would threaten the safety of every road user,” Russ Rader, spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, wrote in an email. “It’s disheartening to see this kind of proposal when about 10,000 people are killed on our roads in speed-related crashes every year.”
In January, Germany’s government rejected a proposal to impose a speed limit on the Autobahn after a government-appointed committee recommended restricting driving speeds on portions of the famed highway in an effort to cut carbon emissions.
