Why Can’t There Not Be Speed Limits On Certain Back Roads?

October 29, 2007

On my 45 minute long trek home everyday from the city in which I work and play in with my friends to my middle of nowhere lying house there is this road called 210. 210 is an old highway back road that is 55 mph in almost all parts. A tiny stretch is 45 mph but that part isn’t part of this topic. On most of the sections of this road I find myself wishing that maybe just one day I can go down this road balls to the wall and not have to worry about the cop sitting around the next corner (which happens a lot) or any of the other drivers that hardly ever desire to do the proper speed limit and just hold you up for no real reason being there at all. I want so badly to be able to have a private road race on highway 210. It would be so perfect for it. The road surface is very well paved in the latter part closer to my house, and it has some of the best tight and loose corners I have ever driven on.

There is this one turn that has a nice bank to start the turn off but then in the middle of the turn straightens out so you feel like you are going well over the speed limit when doing 60 mph. I know this turn you could drop down to about third gear and just haul through it and come out the other end with your back end swimming nice and smooth. You would then upshift to fourth gear where you would feel the road start to tighten up as you shifted to fifth but back to third for the next bend that is a beautiful longer type s turn. By the end of highway 210 you will have probably have gone as slow as 60 or 70 miles per hour and gotten up to speeds in excess of 140 mph in certain cars.

There are so many old roads/highways around America that have either remained perfect, turned really crappy and never fixed right or have been made perfect. I know of a few here in North Carolina where I live. There was a back road from my ex girlfriends house to the mall about 15 minutes away that was just utterly perfect until they made it even better. For a long while there was no speed limit posted on the road and I am not about to tell you the speeds I did hit in my BMW 330i Sport at that time. After they repaved the road they put up 45 mph speed limit signs everywhere but still there were never any police patrolling the area at all.

I wonder why we don’t have many real road course racing like it was when racing first started. I know the need to make the streets safe along with all of the millions of cars on the road these days prompts us to have to remain under wraps until we can find the nearest local track to take it out on. But still, there is always that desire to want to see either how fast we can make it to a certain part of town or even more so how much fun it would be to drive a road legally with no speed limits and no way to hurt anyone else. I personally can’t wait for the day that I am able to do that on some incredible back road that desires to be run hard.

Is it just me or is it like the local government is taunting us with some very great roads? Why can’t we close down certain sections of roads and be able to hold a public yet professional race or driving pleasure on roads like highway 210? Do you really think that the song “Route 66” was written because of the beautiful scenery on the road? Hell no! It was written because of an amazing road that demanded to be driven. We need to have more roads like Monaco and Circuit De La Sarthe of Le Mans in France and Bathurst in Australia. Of course there are more but these are some of the more popular roads that are closed down to become race tracks for a few races per year and reopened to be public roads the rest of it. Who else is with me on this?

–Josh