Bill gives Transportation Commission power to change speed limits
Caven Wade
(UM Legislative News Service) If a bill in the Senate Highway and Transportation Committee passes, the Transportation Commission would have the authority to change speed limits throughout the state.
Sen. Barry Usher, R-Laurel, is sponsoring Senate Bill 452, which gives the state’s Transportation Commission the ability to reassess speed limits they put in place previously, and alter the speed limits on highways.
“Several times in this committee I’ve talked about the speed limit on Highway 212 between Crow and the Wyoming state line. I’ve complained for years and keep getting the same roadblock from people in MDOT and Transportation Commission. Anybody I’ve talked to says they're not allowed to raise the speed limit without permission, and I said well then we need to look at giving you the authority,” Usher said.
The Transportation Commission is an agency of the Department of Transportation that has five members appointed by the governor. They are tasked with allocating highway funds, prioritizing project maintenance and more.
Usher said he knows that there are several roads in Montana that have an outdated speed limit, or simply one that doesn’t make sense.
“Our Department of Transportation, their goal is to be safe, but it’s also to keep commerce moving,” Usher said.
No one testified in support or opposition of the bill.
Committee members raised questions about the safety implications that this bill could have.
“One of the things that we looked at, we actually looked at state-wide and did some national review of locations where we have a speed differential. So a lot of Montana’s highways have a difference in speed between commercial vehicles and passenger vehicles,” Dustin Rouse, the highways and engineering administrator for the Montana Department of Transportation, said as an informational witness. “One of the things we found is in locations that have large commercial vehicle, semi-truck use, that mix if you have that speed differential can lead to an increase in crashes.”
Rouse said the specific highway Usher talked about had a safety review done on it and it was originally set as having no speed differential between commercial and passenger vehicles due to the overall safety of the route.
“Through the establishment of that speed limit we did end up lowering the speed of the passenger vehicles to align with the truck speed, and it was to find that balance of where we believed, because behind all this we want to make sure were setting speeds that are also enforceable and that people will follow,” Rouse said
The committee took no immediate action on the bill.