Washington Legislature raises speed limit to 60 miles per hour in March 1951.

  • By Cassandra Tate
  • Posted 11/09/2004
  • HistoryLink.org Essay 7127
See Additional Media

In March 1951, the Washington Legislature raises the speed limit on the state's highways to 60 miles per hour, despite a highway department survey showing that not a single highway in the western part of the state was safe at that speed.

Most of the state's highways had been designed for vehicles that were smaller and slower than those on the roads by the early 1950s. Accident rates had risen as the volume and speed of traffic increased. Rates decreased during World War II, when the speed limit was reduced to 35 mph as a conservation measure, but rose again when the previous limit of 50 mph was restored at the end of the war in 1945.

After the war, the highway department began pressing for access controls as a way of improving highway safety. This approach had been used successfully in several other states. Vehicles entering or leaving the traffic stream created hazards on narrow but high-speed roadways. In 1945, state highway engineers began trying to convert the Pacific Highway between Tacoma and Everett (then the most heavily traveled highway in the state) to a four-lane limited access highway. However, the Legislature curtailed this effort two years later when it passed a bill authorizing the department to restrict access only on new routes, not on existing roads.

In 1951, at the same time it raised the speed limit to 60 mph, the Legislature finally gave the highway department the authority to use access controls as a way of upgrading existing highways to meet modern safety standards.


Sources:

Paul Dorpat and Genevieve McCoy, Building Washington (Seattle: Tartu Publications, 1998); Twenty-first Biennial Report of the Director of Highways, 1944-1946 (Olympia: State of Washington Department of Highways, 1946); 1947 Wash. Laws, Ch. 202; 1951 Wash. Laws, Ch. 28 (speed limit); 1951 Wash. Laws, Ch. 167 (limited access).


Licensing: This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons license that encourages reproduction with attribution. Credit should be given to both HistoryLink.org and to the author, and sources must be included with any reproduction. Click the icon for more info. Please note that this Creative Commons license applies to text only, and not to images. For more information regarding individual photos or images, please contact the source noted in the image credit.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
Major Support for HistoryLink.org Provided By: The State of Washington | Patsy Bullitt Collins | Paul G. Allen Family Foundation | Museum Of History & Industry | 4Culture (King County Lodging Tax Revenue) | City of Seattle | City of Bellevue | City of Tacoma | King County | The Peach Foundation | Microsoft Corporation, Other Public and Private Sponsors and Visitors Like You