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Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
This sounds like another band-aid solution.
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Exactly my thought. It's beneficial effects are highly questionable.
If the speed limit is lowered, congestion increases. It's a simple formula and could be viewed as an analogue to the Bernoulli principle. So with lower speed limits you get people wasting gas by idling or going too slow instead of going too fast.The net change is likely to be very small.
That, of course, assumes that people obey the new speed limit and fails to address the social aspect. People know that cars are safe up to higher speeds these days and are likely to get frustrated with arbitrarily low limits; given that, the adherence to such a law is questionable.
Outlawing a class of engines doesn't work either, because there are a lot of people who do need bigger vehicles. Farmers and truckers, for example, both need towing power and cargo capacity. Granted nobody needs a car that goes 200 mph, but there's a very large and very profitable enthusiast community based around such vehicles, so outlawing them doesn't really work either.
Americans (and Canadians, for that matter) screwed up by making their roads too wide. If we had narrower streets nobody would buy the great big SUV's because they'd be impractical and frustrating to drive. Can't fix that now, though.
Seriously, there are better ways to save the environment. Assuming global warming is as big a deal as everyone seems to think, economic pressures will drive oil powered vehicles off the road long before the Earth turns into an EZ Bake.