AUDIO:

"The EcoNews Report," Nov. 14, 2026.

The following is a rough machine transcript. Click the words to skip to that point in the audio.

TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining me is my friend and colleague, Colin Fiske, Executive Director of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities, or CRTP.

All right, so Colin, this week we are going to be talking about the safety corridor in particular, but vehicle speeds more generally. So recently, you wrote an op-ed in the Lost Coast Outpost about Caltrans's speed increase on the safety corridor, that portion of highway that runs along Humboldt Bay between Arcata and Eureka. So if you haven't been paying attention, this section of road has been a hotspot for accidents because the highway was filled with poor on-ramps, highway crossings, and Caltrans completed a large structural fix to the road to add an overpass at Indianola and to close some of these highway crossings elsewhere on the safety corridor.

So this was a welcome improvement for transportation advocates like you, like CRTP, who were alarmed at the high rate of accidents on the safety corridor. But then soon after the work was completed on this road, Caltrans announced that it was going to increase the speed from 50 to 60 miles per hour. So taking it away from here, why are you, as a transportation safety advocate, I should say, concerned about this increased speed on the safety corridor?

COLIN FISKE:

So speed in general is really the biggest factor when it comes to safety on our roads. Speed is the biggest predictor of whether people will get into a crash, and it's the biggest predictor of how severe the results of that crash will be if it happens. And this happens at all speeds, I would say even at lower speeds. For example, the types of speeds that we drive through our cities, more like 20 to 40 miles an hour, in that range, when you go from 20 to 40 miles an hour, you go from about a 10% chance of killing a pedestrian if you hit them as a driver to about an 80% chance.

Now at the highway speeds that we're talking about, hopefully you're not going to hit a pedestrian or a bicyclist now that we have the Bay Trail, but that speed still has a huge impact on the potential results of a vehicle either leaving the road or hitting another vehicle. So to get to the point of reducing the likelihood of a crash to begin with, for one thing, the stopping time increases substantially and the stopping distance increases substantially the faster you go. So I calculated that if you're following the speed limit and you go from 50 to 60 miles an hour in this corridor, let's say the asphalt is wet, which at this time of year it is pretty much by default, your stopping distance increases by about 114 feet. So that's a lot of car lengths longer that it takes you to stop, which means you're much more likely to hit another vehicle if you slam on the brakes.

WHEELER:

And I will say that there are design features about this section of the road that make stopping routine. So part of the highway safety improvements that were added was a stoplight at the airport area there. And the six mile an hour zone begins before the stoplight. So you can get up to speed, up to 60 miles an hour, and then on the highway there is a stoplight. So stopping is not a hypothetical, it is something built into the design of the road.

People are meant to stop on that road. And based on my own kind of driving of the road, I would say I'd stop once every four trips between Arcata and Eureka going north.

FISKE:

And I would add to that as someone who uses the Bay Trail quite a bit, the most dangerous and scary part of the Bay Trail is crossing the driveway at break cut. And already when it was just, when it was 50 mile an hour speeds, the speed at which a vehicle comes onto that deceleration lane and gets ready to swing around that corner into the break cut area is very high and you can be on a bike and you can look and think no one's there and the amount of time it takes them to get there is very short, 60 miles an hour, even shorter. So I would say that it will make that particular location also significantly more dangerous.

Not to mention that a lot of the area where the new trail was developed, there's no vertical barrier protecting the trail. And frankly, the faster people are going, especially we know people don't always follow the speed limit, but they tend to drive faster when the speed limit is higher. The faster people are going, the greater likelihood there's someone just leaving the road, which is a very common kind of crash in our area and maybe even hitting the trail. So it really does have a significant safety impact in that regard.

WHEELER:

So stopping distance are gonna be elongated. One point that you made with stopping distance is if people are following the speed limit. I don't know if you have heard similar things said, but when I was growing up, my dad used to tell me that the speed limit was whatever it is posted plus 10%.

So you could go in excess of the speed limit by 10%. Obviously this is not legal, but so for him, if you were in a 60 mile an hour zone, he said that you were in the clear to go 66 and you probably wouldn't be pulled over. If you were in a 50 mile an hour zone, it'd be 55 and so on going down. And I think a lot of people follow this same logic such that when you have faster speed limits, you will also have faster speeding relative to the actual posted speed limit.

FISKE:

Yeah, I think that's probably right. And I would say, I've had this experience, I've had people tell me about new traffic calming, for example, like a bulb out or a speed hump or something like that, they'll say, well, I can't go the speed limit and navigate this traffic calming device. So how is that possible? And the assumption there is that the speed limit is in fact, the mandatory or even the minimum speed that you should be going instead of what it legally is, which is the limit, the fastest that you should be going. So I do think there is a cultural thing.

It's not just here. There are different traffic cultures in different parts of the country, but it's pretty universal in my experience that people do not view the speed limit as an actual limit. So that is a cultural issue.

WHEELER:

For sure. So Highway 101 also, when going south, will enter the city of Eureka and the speed limit will decrease first to 35 miles an hour, and then I think eventually to 30 miles an hour. One of your concerns has been that folks who are traveling fast on the road will now start to travel faster once they get into Eureka.

And Eureka itself, as we've had many shows on, Highway 101 through Eureka is a particularly dangerous road because it is cutting through the heart of Eureka. There are lots of pedestrian crossings, there are lots of cross streets that could have somebody pull out in front of you. What are your feelings about how the speed limit might affect driving elsewhere, not just on the safety corridor?

FISKE:

I'm very concerned about it. I think anyone who drives or bikes or walks in that portion of fourth and fifth streets that are around target or the DMV or adjacent to the corridor that we're talking about knows that traffic speeds are much higher there. They sort of bleed over from the more freeway like section of the corridor between Arcata and Eureka. My experience is that drivers don't fully get down to the new speed limit in the city if they ever do until they hit a red light basically coming from the north and going out of the city, going north folks really just start to pick up that speed well before they leave town and so I think that if we are concerned about those particularly dangerous streets already, which certainly we are and I hope other folks are, that is a major concern. And in fact, when you look at the record of some of the most serious crashes, many of them are in that northern part of the corridor between from say R Street 255 up to the Eureka Slough Bridge. So where people are going faster and will be going even faster, it just increases the dangers in an already dangerous place.

And I want to say too that I'm not here trying to blame individuals necessarily. I think people respond to the environment they're given, whether that's the speed limit that's posted or the road design. And I can say from many road trips that I've taken, I think probably other folks can relate to this. You spend a while driving at highway speeds and then you pull off into town somewhere and all of a sudden going 30 miles an hour feels like a crawl. It takes a while to really readjust your mental metric to the speeds that you should be going.

So that is a big concern for me.

WHEELER:

So we touched on this a little bit earlier. So when you are driving at faster speeds and you're in a metal box that weighs a couple thousand pounds, you have a larger kinetic energy at faster speeds. You're possessing more mass that's moving forward at a certain speed. There's some sort of a formula that I learned when I was in physics class in high school that I forget now. But that's all to say that you are going to then collide if you do collide with something and you're going to transfer that energy into the thing that you collide with and the impact is going to then be more severe. So you've touched on a little bit the increased danger from faster speeds, but perhaps you wanted to continue on that a bit because I feel like we changed directions a little. Sure.

FISKE:

Yeah, so you're right, kinetic energy is the real determinant of how damaging a crash is when it occurs, and kinetic energy increases with speed, and I'm trying to remember that formula too, the physicist can correct me, I think it increases with the square of speed. In other words, the kinetic energy increases much faster than the speed does. So in this particular case, going from 50 to 60 miles an hour, again if you're following the speed limit, increases the kinetic energy of a vehicle by almost half, by 44%.

So that 10 mile an hour change has a big impact on what the result is if you are in a crash, whether you are seriously injured or whether you even survive a crash.

And so of course we want to avoid crashes to begin with, but it also makes the difference in terms of the likelihood of survival when a crash occurs.

WHEELER:

So we want to avoid crashes to begin with. So speed impacts your stopping distance, but it also impacts your ability to take in the visual stimuli around you and be able to respond safely to potential threats on the road, whether that is another car or something like a skunk that has meandered out onto the 101 that you might try to swerve to avoid.

You've told me about this before, about our field of vision with speed. And I thought that that was really interesting and something that I kind of now look for when I'm driving myself. So I hope that you can tell us again about our field of vision and how it narrows as we drive faster.

FISKE:

Yeah, that's exactly right, in being able to see anything to either side of you without looking back and forth, and when you look back and forth, of course, you're not looking in front of you. So any highway, I would say that the reason that it is, in my opinion, more of an issue on this particular corridor than it might be on, say, a true freeway, is that, as we were talking about before, we have all these other things going on, even with the medians being closed. We still have a number of on-ramps and off-ramps, we still have a couple of driveways, we have this traffic light, we have frequent construction, we have the trail right next to the road. So being able to see things in your peripheral vision is, I think, even more important on this stretch of road than in a typical freeway. And as you mentioned, you have the roadkill issue, I guess, for lack of a better term. And that's true, really, throughout our region, and maybe something that we should talk more about at some point.

But I think we sort of, I don't know, downplayed the issue by calling it roadkill. It is, as you probably know better than me, it's a major source of mortality for a lot of species. And also, it is a safety issue. A lot of people every year in the U.S. die either from hitting large animals like deer, or from swerving to avoid animals and losing control of their vehicle. So yeah, that's definitely an issue here and in other parts of our region.

WHEELER:

So the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities, your organization, is concerned about making a safer transportation system broadly for all of us, whether that is people who are driving in cars or people who are on foot or on a wheel of some sort, whether there's a scooter or bike or whatever it is. Safety is one thing. You are also concerned about the environmental impact of our transportation system. And I would love to get into the way that speed is related to other environmental impacts. So we've touched on wildlife. Wildlife, I believe, is more likely to be killed with faster speeds because, again, we are less capable of safely reacting to it when it comes onto the roadway.

But let's talk about energy use and greenhouse gas emissions and speed. So we've talked about how kinetic energy increases, and it's not quite an exponential increase with speed, but it goes up more than the percent of our speed goes up or whatever. You are listening to the Econews Report. And we're talking about vehicle speed with Colin Fiske, Executive Director of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities. So an increase in kinetic energy also then therefore means an increase in the energy used to get to that speed. So what do we know about increasing speed and its cost in vehicle or miles per gallon?

FISKE:

Yeah, well, I think you pretty much said it, the faster you drive, especially once you get up to highway-like speeds, the faster you drive, the more energy is used. And so with a fossil fuel powered vehicle, which is still the vast majority of vehicles on our road, that means more tailpipe emissions at higher speeds, even with an EV, which of course is much better for the environment, it still means using more energy. And that means that when you go to, when you'll have to charge it sooner, which uses electricity, and although our grid is relatively clean here, we're still using a lot of fracked natural gas from the Humboldt Bay Generating Station. So yeah, any way you look at it, you have more emissions from driving faster. And the other thing, which is a little bit more indirect, is that faster speeds encourage people to drive more.

And we've talked about this in other contexts, and it's kind of a tricky concept to get your mind around. But in this case, I think one easy way to think about it is, if it takes less time, or even if there's a perception that it takes less time to get, say, from Arcata to Eureka, then over time, people who make that trip for various reasons are likely to make it more often, because there's a perceived lower time cost to doing it. So you might go, let's say you live in Eureka, and you might come to Arcata more often for dinner, or to visit a friend, or whatever those things are, which are great things to do. But again, when you lower that time threshold, people do it more, and that results in more emissions.

In this case, I do think it's important to point out that the actual difference in speed, depending on where in Arcata or Eureka you're going, but between the two towns, the actual difference in travel time between going 50 miles an hour and 60 miles an hour is less than a minute, 50 seconds or so. But there's a perception, I think, that the difference is greater, and that it's faster to get there when you're going faster. And so that perception will probably lead to more driving.

WHEELER:

So I want to talk about kind of the community response to something like this. Because frankly, I was disappointed. In response to Caltrans announcement that the speed limit was being increased by 10 miles per hour, I saw a lot of comments online joking that people were saying that they were excited, people were joking that they were gonna go even faster now, that people were excited to let it rip in some sense. In response to your op-ed, I posted some stupid comment in the comment section of the Lost Coast Outpost, and you can upvote or downvote comments. And I was ratioed, I was significantly downvoted.

I think that there's a way in which people are starting to move to know that safety improvements elsewhere are good, that these bull bouts are good, and that they're an improvement on our streets, that other interventions like better signage and lighting on crosswalks are good, and that they help reduce pedestrian deaths. It seems like the issue of speed, however, is one in which people are really defensive. And there's also perhaps kind of a gender issue to all this too, that I see a lot of kind of like machismo in this idea that like driving fast is manly and driving fast is cool. So how do you, as the executive director of an organization that is trying to create safer streets, and that often means lower speed limits, how do you deal with this car-brained culture in which speed is celebrated, and it's viewed as manly in the American way, that we want to have fast roads?

These all seem very popular with people, and slower speed limits seem like a nanny state response that is out of vogue with voters.

FISKE:

You know, it's a good question, and I think that you're identifying a very real thing, which is not something that CRTP as this little local non-profit in Humboldt County is going to solve on our own. This is a big cultural issue. I think, for one thing, you can see where some of this might come from if you just look at any car ad, pick any car ad you want.

And cars are very often marketed, I would say mostly marketed, as like you said, as being sort of macho and masculine and big and scary and whatever, and you can be the master of your domain kind of thing. But also, they're marketed for speed. And I don't know if you can remember the last time you saw a car ad where there was another car on the road besides the one that was being marketed, but typically there isn't. And they're marketed as a way to zip from one point to another. It's the sense of freedom. You can go as fast as you want and go wherever you want. And I think that idea of the car as freedom, as speed, as masculinity has been around since the car first was mass marketed over 100 years ago and has never really changed that much.

And I think in all of that time, not to get too dorky here, but if you go back to in history, you know, to the time when the first cars were starting to really enter towns and cities, you saw that drivers were hitting a lot of pedestrians and it was a big political issue. And drivers, people were mad because the street was previously a place where people did just walk wherever they wanted. But drivers were also mad because the advantage of the car, the thing they were so excited about was speed. And they couldn't go fast if there were other people in their way. And I think that that frustration continues where we're really marketed this idea that a car is freedom and speed and like you said, often masculinity.

But in reality, that's rarely the case, right? We do share the road with other vehicles and other people. And so I think this sort of like pent up frustration of like, oh, I never get to use the full power of my vehicle to go super fast and all these things that made me feel so powerful or convinced me that this was the way to go. And frankly, having spent over a century designing our roads and building massive road networks to allow people to get wherever they wanted, almost as fast as they wanted, we never really succeeded at that.

But the cost has been enormous in terms of the lives lost, in terms of the climate change, in terms of the impacts on people who can't drive, who have a disability or can't afford a car. So I think there's a mismatch, what I'm trying to say, between the idea of cars and the reality of cars that leads to a lot of frustration about not being able to drive as fast as you want.

WHEELER:

So in your work with something like speed, right, if you are advocating for slower and therefore safer roads, it's usually part of kind of a larger suite of road improvements, some of which are less controversial. As an advocate, do you ever feel that you need to not do the thing which is science based because of the politics? Do you feel like you need to avoid certain issues, certain fixes that can make our roads more safe because ultimately you're going to be having to sell this to Caltrans or to Humboldt County Public Works or folks who are themselves car brained and maybe responsive to people in the public who also exist under this dominant paradigm? Do you moderate yourself as a consequence?

FISKE:

You know, I try not to, I think certainly at CRTP, we try to be strategic about where are the opportunities to actually make progress, to make the streets safer. And we take opportunities where they come, which is not always, there's not always an opportunity to do it. But at the same time, we also try to focus our energies on the places that are the most dangerous and where there is the greatest potential to improve safety like Fourth Street and Fifth Street and Broadway. Fundamentally, CRTP is not just an advocacy organization, it is also a public education organization.

And I think that it's incumbent on us to communicate the facts about what the dangers are, what the impacts of this transportation system are, and what we know about the evidence-based ways to address those impacts, to mitigate them and reduce them and eliminate them. And so even if those things are not always popular, I think it's important for people to know. And I will say that in the time I've been doing this, which is 11 years now, some of the things that I was saying a decade ago that were very unpopular or people just thought I was crazy, there's a lot more acceptance of now. And CRTP isn't fully responsible for that. There's a lot of other folks, researchers and advocates around the country who have been doing this work too. But I think as we get evidence out there and factual information about our transportation system, I think that does have an impact over time, even if in the moment it's hard for some people to hear.

WHEELER:

And you also shift the narrative in a way that makes smaller wins easier. Or we would say it in nerdy online political speak, you're shifting the Overton window. So when you're talking about, let's say, lane diets to try to improve Fourth and Fifth Street in Eureka, I think that that also has a benefit of making daylighting crosswalks easier because by comparison, this is going to be a less controversial item, which will also improve safety. So in the way that the government resolves conflict, you help make other stuff easier too. Or maybe that's just what I tell myself as well.

FISKE:

Yeah, I think that's right, although I do want to emphasize that when we make a recommendation like that, like converting a lane to a...

WHEELER:

... and you truly want the thing to happen. It's not some sort of Machiavellian strategy.

FISKE:

Oh, it's because that's what the evidence suggests would have the biggest impact on safety. So yeah, but yeah, I think you're, I think you're right. As any advocate knows, you never get everything that you want or everything that you ask for, but you keep going and do, and do what you can. And I think the reason that I am so obsessed with, some would say, I guess, transportation is that there's just this urgency to it in my mind that comes from the safety impacts where we can save lives relatively easily if we choose to do so, if we have the political will to do it, and we can act and prevent people from dying tomorrow or next week or next year. And we have the ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation.

And again, it's so urgent that we're seeing the impacts of climate change right now here in Humboldt. And we can make it easier and more dignified to get around for people who are just never going to be drivers. People who have certain disabilities or can't afford a car or whatever. There are such urgent and important and impactful reasons to make some of these reforms to our policies and to our streets and highways that I think just like with any advocate, I feel like we have to keep, keep doing it and keep pushing and whatever progress we make is, is, is impactful somewhere.

WHEELER:

All right, well, I will say CRTP has had a huge impact in the last 10 years in Humboldt County. And one of the things that was disappointing to me was that I felt like our local Caltrans office was actually headed in the right direction, that they were starting to do more highway safety projects, that they were starting to prioritize things like the South Broadway safety improvements that are recently completed to kind of contaminate this project in this way, to make a big deal about a safety improvement project on the safety corridor to then, after it's complete, make the safety corridor then less safe by increasing speeds just felt almost like a moral loss more than anything else.

FISKE:

Yeah, I agree. And just to point out, like almost $50 million, like two decades of work to get this project built.

And it's not just the state, it's not just Caltrans money. Over the course of a decade or so, our local governments donated a significant amount of the state money that would have otherwise gone to their local projects to this one in order to make it happen. I don't think they were told that the end result would be raising the speed limit. So this does seem, I'll admit it feels a little bit like a betrayal from Caltrans and I am very disappointed.

WHEELER:

Well, Caltrans Director Matt Brady, I hope you're listening. And well, so speed limits been increased, but CRTP remains unbound and unbroken, and we'll continue to fight for safety improvements throughout the North Coast. Thank you for joining me, Colin Fiske, from the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities. Thanks for having me, Tom. All right, join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.