Last week the Legislature held a hearing on my bill, LB164, a bill to give local governments of towns with populations in excess of 500 people authority to change speed limits whenever hazardous conditions exist.

I first introduced this bill last year, but the Transportation Committee never advanced it. Last year I came to the Transportation Committee with letters of support from the City of Oshkosh as well as a petition signed by 100 local residents concerning the hazardous conditions along State Highway 26 in Oshkosh.

On Monday I told the members of the Transportation Committee that I had contacted the folks in Oshkosh again this year and asked if they would like to submit letters of support for the bill as they did the last year, but this time they declined. I told the Transportation Committee, “The people of Oshkosh declined because they told me you can only be told to sit down and shut up so many times before you give up.” And so, they didn’t believe that it would do them any good to write more letters or call more people or get involved. They may have given up, but I have not.

The Nebraska Department of Transportation has tossed all logic and common sense out of the window when it comes to setting speed limits. But, you don’t have to take my word on this because that is exactly what Moe Jamshidi, the Director of the Department of Transportation, told the committee members as he touted the virtues of the Department’s own engineering studies. According to Jamshidi, the Department of Transportation’s own engineering studies take precedence over common sense. For instance, he told the committee, “While it might seem like common sense, it’s not always true that lower speed limits reduce the number of crashes.”

The Department of Transportation’s reliance upon engineering studies is fraught with problems. When the Department of Transportation conducts an engineering study in Western Nebraska, they pay a traffic engineer as much as $20,000 to sit in a pick-up truck along the highway for a few hours to observe the flow of traffic and write up a report. That’s how they do it. And somehow this engineer’s word about traffic conditions carries more weight than the people who live, work and play in the area.

The fact of the matter is that speed limits along state highways are arbitrarily determined. I pointed this fact out in the hearing by showing the committee members aerial pictures of highway 26 in Oshkosh and comparing to aerial pictures of Lewellen. In Oshkosh, where the speed limit is 45 mph, the road cuts through the town, bends, and has businesses located on both sides of the road. However, in Lewellen, where the speed limit is only 40 mph, the road moves along the perimeter of the town, is straight, and has railroad tracks with no businesses on one side of the road. So, the fact that Lewellen has a slower speed limit than Oshkosh proves my point that speed limits are arbitrarily determined.

I introduced LB164 in order to change Nebraska nonsensical way of setting speed limits. Logic and common sense are not dead…yet. The people who live in Oshkosh know where the hazardous conditions lie, and they know that the current speed limit of 45 mph is too high.

I sincerely hope that the Legislature’s Transportation Committee advances LB164 out of committee and up to the floor of the Unicameral for debate. I look forward to debating this bill on General File because I have more hope for logic and common sense to prevail in the State Legislature than I do in the Nebraska Department of Transportation.