Senator John Warner (R-VA) recently suggested that the nation reexamine a 55-mph national speed limit. Supposedly, this measure would save 167,000 barrels of gasoline a day -- 2% of America's daily usage -- and even diminish traffic deaths by 4,000 per year. It will also help maintain our nation's highways, abate global climate change, and quite possibly, win us the War in Iraq and the one in Vietnam retroactively.

Warner's enthusiasm comes from a Department of Energy study claiming that automobile fuel efficiency diminishes every 5 mph past 60. Like many people born in 1927, Senator Warner remembers the 1974 National Maximum Speed Law, as well as when ice cream used to cost only a nickel. Originally set at 55 mph, the national limit was raised in 1987 and repealed altogether in 1995.

This is a solution that would only exacerbate the problem. The modern highway system depends on cars moving at variable speeds, individually fit to the variable demands placed on each stretch of road by the flow of traffic. In other words, slower traffic means more gridlock and more time on the road, which means burning more gas, at a slower speed indeed.

And every car engine works differently -- 55 is not some magic number. The most efficient speed of a Prius is different than a Ford pick-up's. Or maybe it's even more efficient for the pick-up to be carrying the Prius; let's mandate that.

If Senator Warner's limit were properly enforced, the fender-bender backups prevented will undoubtedly be offset by the sheer friction from so many drivers being pulled over for driving at the logical speed they are used to. And would their violation of this nation-wide law be treated as a federal offense?  Think of what we could do with all the revenue generated from the speeding tickets, like...buy more oil!

I admire Senator Warner's bravado-it takes a certain, daring courage to propose a measure that has already been tried and abandoned. Unless, of course, his real motivation is just to prohibit "those dang kids from driving so fast."

Senator Warner's speed limit solution is a stalling tactic on the large scale. It is as if the 81-year-old is begging us to have the decency to postpone crisis until he does not have to worry about it (or anything else).  

We've already made air travel as unpleasant as possible. Let's not do the same to car travel -- it's already slow enough.