[doviatt]

I live in Utah,

The place where they did the increase in limit is a very remote area between nothing and nothing (I haven't been down there in a while though). Long and pretty much straight with not much traffic let alone any congestion. Any curves do scare you into slowing down if you aren't paying attention.

Utah doesn't care much about the environment. We want to store the worlds nuclear waste here also (I don't), greedy *******s. We added a HOV lane a while ago and then never advertised it. They never told or taught people to carpool to take advantage of it. So when it went mostly unused people complained and they turned it into a toll lane. Pay up and you can now speed in this lane also with no tolerance of law abiding car pool users. The financial benefit of taking this toll overshadowed the desire to conserve and promote carpools. I car pool every day but I don't use the HOV lane. The standard congestion usually matches my 45-55 speed I maintain in the RIGHT (SLOW) lane.

after re-reading the original post it does appear to only refer to the remote locations only. There is no way they could supply a real engineered study to justify this in metro areas. $$$ speak loudly though.