To the editor:
As Marblehead’s appointee to the MBTA Advisory Board, it would be inappropriate for me to address the substance of my neighbor John G. DiPiano’s argument against the 3A zoning bylaw in this venue. As a pedantic transportation historian, however, I must correct his memory regarding federal coercion and the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit.
Fifty-five was a federal law, signed in 1973 by President Nixon in response to the OPEC oil embargo. The only precedent for this was the national “Victory Speed Limit” of 35 miles per hour set during World War II. In 1995, Congress returned control over speed limits to the states. One stretch of Texas highway now has an 85-mile-per-hour limit.
Mr. DiPiano may be conflating this history with that of the drinking age, which has always been set at the state level. Unlike the speed limit, the federal government had no basis on which to set a national drinking age. But to reduce alcohol-involved traffic deaths in the 1980s, the federal government threatened to withhold Highway Trust Fund monies from states unless they raised the state drinking age from 18 to 21. All states eventually complied.
The national speed limit was widely derided: Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55” reached 26 on the Billboard charts in 1984. Attitudes toward the raised drinking age change are more mixed.
Dan Albert
Marblehead