Speeding: An Ode To Our Favorite Form of Civil Disobedience

From the December 2017 issue

Many are the blessings of the automobile: independence, mobility, freedom. But the greatest of these is freedom! While going too fast.

Speeding is art. At 120 mph, you’re in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. At 60 mph, you’re in Ohio.

Speeding is poetry. “Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee, O Time,” as John Milton, lead-foot-avant-la-lettre, put it in his poem “On Time.”

Speeding is literature. “ . . . a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road,” per Jack Kerouac.

Speeding is the source of America’s greatest contribution to global culture—the car chase.

Without the car chase, the world would lack for touchstones of beauty, form, grace, and perception. The Keystone Kops. Bullitt. The Aston Martin DB5 in Goldfinger driven by the only real James Bond, Sean Connery. The happy ending of Thelma and Louise. Mad Max. The French Connection. Smokey and the Bandit.

The 1970s were the golden age of speeding. Credit goes to the two great patrons of the Speeding Arts, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, who instituted and enforced the creative stimulus of the double-nickel speed limit.

Even before that new limit was established, we witnessed the era’s most moving (and fastest-moving) exhibition of performance art. The Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash was composed and directed by Car and Driver’s own Brock Yates and Steve Smith and acted out between the Red Ball Garage in New York and the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach. Running time: 35 hours, 54 minutes.

“Stay Alive—Drive 55” also brought speeding to the masses. Lowering highway speed to the pace of a fat arthritic cheetah let even the most timid and normally law-abiding American feel the rebel thrill of being Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road.

And it built character. Speeding was a moral commitment to nonviolent—unless you crashed—civil disobedience. Put the pedal to the metal and you were fighting for Truth (cars are fast), Justice (speed traps are bogus), and the American Way (way, way faster than 55 mph). Every speeder was a Mahatma Gandhi with the wind blowing through his hair, if Gandhi had had any hair.

But that was long ago. Now speeding is dead.

Speeding wasn’t killed by police radar or laser guns or automatic cameras recording license-plate numbers. Speeding was killed by math. There are 2.7 million miles of paved road in the U.S. and 263.6 million registered motor vehicles.

When those vehicles are all on the road—and they all are—just look at the traffic! Divide miles of road by number of vehicles and the space you have to drive too fast in is 54 feet.

The problem was evident as early as 1994 in the O.J. Simpson white Bronco low-speed chase.

There are a few lonely country roads left. But they’re full of hikers, joggers, bicyclists, and participants in Ironman triathlons. Fitness fanatics are swimming in the roads.

Yes, you can go to the track. And the hamster can go to its wheel. And the gym rat can go to his treadmill and dial it up to “the Flash.” It’s fun. But it’s not freedom.