A stretch of highway in Texas will have the nation’s highest speed limit at 85 miles per hour.
The Texas Transportation Commission approved the new speed limit for a 41-mile-long stretch of the Texas 130 highway, reported the Houston Chronicle.
The segment is being built by State Highway 130 Concession Co., a private consortium, and it is slated for completion in mid-November.
“We‘ll certainly meet the deadline, and we think we’ll beat it,” spokesman Chris Lippincott said to the Chronicle.
“On any road, drivers hold the key to safety based on traffic, travel conditions, and the capabilities of their own vehicles,” the consortium said in a statement.
But the project has its share of critics.
“The research is clear that when speed limits go up, fatalities go up,” Russ Rader, spokesman with the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, told The Associated Press.
He said that a faster speed limit allows people to travel quicker, “but the trade-off is more crashes and more highway deaths.”
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