In the absence of any explanation for imposing the world’s lowest freeway speed limits, we must assume that the McGuinty Liberals want to finance the highway extension from “speeding” tickets. (Anyone charged with doing 100 km/h in any ‘80’ zone faces a huge fine plus three demerit points.)

Then again, the absurd situation parallels that found in many parts of Ontario, and nowhere more so than in the Town of Caledon, which actually has paved rural highways posted at 40 km/h and where roadways that had 80 km/h limits when they were gravel now boast the same 60 km/h signs found on arterial streets like Etobicoke;s Kipling and Islington Avenues.

We haven’t seen any recent survey but suspect that if Ontario drivers were polled you wouldn’t find one in 1,000 who could honestly say they always obey all posted speed limits.

In fact, any drivers trying to keep pace with the general flow of traffic will find that on major roads like Highways 9 and 10 that flow is about 95 km/h, and higher during rush hours. Similarly, cars that keep to 120 km/h on the 400 series highways will be passed by more cars than they pass.

One would be tempted to think that the safest speeds are those for which highways were designed, and that the best way for a jurisdiction to ensure observance of its speed limits is to make them consistent, reflecting things such as the surface, sharpness of curves and density of local population.

Insofar as consistency is concerned, the last time Ontario really had it was in the 1950s, when Leslie Frost as premier tried to retain just two speed limits — 50 miles an hour in rural areas and 30 m.p.h. in urban areas.

However, even he finally came to realize that 50 was too low a limit for Highways 400, 401 and the Queen Elizabeth Way and allowed theirs to be raised to 60 m.p.h. (roughly 100 km/h).

In the 1960s, when John Robarts was premier, the limits were raised on most, if not all, provincial highways, with the freeways getting the 70 m.p.h. limits for which they were designed, and twolane roads being posted at 55 or 60.

Rural portions of Highway 10 were had the limit raised to 60, even on the narrow, rough asphalt between Brampton and Forks of the Credit Road, and the government responded to complaints that 60 was too fast for that stretch by widening it to four lanes.

However, in the 1970s, when Congress imposed a 55-m.p.h. limit nationally in the U.S., then premier Bill Davis went a step further by reducing the freeway speed limits to 60 and making the limit on all other provincial highways except the northern Trans- Canada route 50 m.p.h.

Since then, speed limits throughout the U.S. and everywhere else in Canada have been raised. But all that has happened in Ontario is conversion of the limits to metric units and lowering them whenever local ratepayers demand, particularly if they are roads that happen to be used by commuters.

Today, all four-lane highways in Saskatchewan and Manitoba and freeways in Alberta, British Columbia and at least some of the Atlantic Provinces have 110 km/h rural limits, pretty much paralleling the situation south of the Canada-U.S. border.

Currently, Hawaii alone of the 50 U.S. states continues to cling to the 55 m.p.h. freeway limit imposed nationwide following the Arab oil embargo of 1973.

Among the continental states, none has a freeway limit as low as Ontario’s 100 km/h, although many set the rural maximum at 65 m.p.h. (about 105 km/h). Michigan is one of 11 states where the current limit is 70 m.p.h., while Interstate routes in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming are currently posted at 75 m.p.h.

No doubt the major reason for the higher speed limits elsewhere in North America has been a desire to achieve better observance by making the limits close to speeds actually being driven. However, they also can be seen as an acknowledgment that features such as seat belts, airbags and crash bars have made today’s cars a lot safer than those in use 40 years ago.

As we see it, an overall improvement in safety as well as a reduction in headon collisions on two-lane roadways would be achieved by adopting the same approach followed in the Robarts era — setting the limits at speeds not exceeded by 85 per cent of the traffic.

On multi-lane highways such as Highway 10 south of Camilla, the rural limit would probably be 100. The 400 series highways would likely be posted at 120 in rural areas and left at 100 in urban portions of the Greater Toronto Area as well as places like Ottawa, London and St. Catharines.

And to reduce the frequency of deadly passing, the higher limits on two-lane roads ought to be accompanied by zerotolerance enforcement.