Something Extra: Hyper Highway
MIAMI (CBS4) - Are you feeling the need for speed? If you are, you might want to move to Texas.
Today, Texas Highway 130, a forty-mile road between Austin and San Antonio, became fastest in the country: the first to have an eighty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit.
Tolls will cost you more than six bucks each way. Alternative roads are so congested, lots of Texans are expected to pony up.
Many Texas highways already had eighty and seventy-five-mile-an-hour limits. The question is whether this is all safe.
Experts say Texas' fatality rate is higher than the national average. But state officials say Highway 130 is in a rural area and that fatalities are declining along Texas highways that were the first to get higher limits.
Texas also plans to further educate people on how to drive at high speed, including thousands of signs across the state saying 'left lane passing only."
One problem, of course, is that people will drive faster than the speed limit. And as one expert said today, air bags and seat belts aren't likely to save you in a crash at a hundred miles an hour.
