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Today in Interstate History

Rural Interstate highway.

January 4, 1975

President Gerald Ford signed into law the Federal-Aid Highway Amendments of 1974. A key provision of the law -- one significantly impacting the Interstate highways -- established the 55-mile-per-hour national maximum speed limit on a long-standing rather than temporary basis. That provision would be relaxed in 1987 to allow speed limits of up to 65 miles per hour on rural Interstate highways. The provision was utimately repealed altogether in the National Highway System Designation Act of 1995, which left it to the states to set speed limits.