Shiny new signs posted last week in northern Nevada signal that the state is joining a trend toward higher speed limits for rural highways — motorists can now hit 80 mph on a 130-mile stretch of Interstate 80.

Nevada has long been known as a state that allows people to do things they cannot do anywhere else in the country, but do not expect any winking boasts that what happens between Fernley and Winnemucca stays between Fernley and Winnemucca. A handful of other states already had a limit of 80 mph or more, and there are places in the world where you can legally go even faster.

Things really are bigger in Texas. And Germany.

A section of State Highway 130 in Texas, a toll road between Austin and San Antonio, has an 85 mph speed limit, the highest in the United States — a fact that drew a lot of attention when the blacktop opened to traffic in 2012. It did not, however, draw a lot of drivers, and the company that won the concession to operate the highway filed for bankruptcy last year.

Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming raised the limits on certain roads to 80 mph in recent years — in part out of a recognition that a lot of people were driving that fast already. Mississippi has a theoretical 80 mph limit; it applies only to toll roads, and the state has no toll roads.

Bulgaria and Poland have limits as high as 140 kilometers per hour, about 87 mph. Of course, such numbers seem paltry when you look at Germany’s fabled autobahn, where some stretches have no absolute limit, and speeds above 100 mph are common. In fact, there are several documented instances of drivers exceeding 200 mph on the autobahn, some of them with video evidence or automotive magazine writers as witnesses.

Why bigger might not be better.

About 35,000 people die each year in traffic accidents in the United States, and nearly 2,000 of those deaths are attributable to increased speed limits, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

But driving has become much safer, thanks to technological innovations like air bags, electronic stability control and anti-lock brakes, and to other factors, like mandatory seat-belt laws and a decline in drunken driving. In the 1960s, the national traffic fatality rate was above 5 per 100 million miles driven. In 2014, it hit the lowest level ever recorded, 1.08 per 100 million miles.

As for the benefits of added speed? On that desolate, 130-mile span of I-80 northeast of Reno, going 80 mph, rather than the old limit, 75, saves 6.5 minutes.

Sammy Hagar cannot drive 55. In most places, he doesn’t have to.

In 1974, the federal government imposed a nationwide 55 mph limit, not out of concern for safety, but to save fuel — a reaction to the OPEC oil embargo.

Plenty of people ignored the limit and many more chafed at it, especially in the wide-open West. In 1987, a new federal law let states set higher limits, though it still discouraged speeds over 65 mph. Then, in 1995, the federal government removed all restrictions, and over the years, posted speeds of 70 and 75 mph cropped up in most states.

But there have been a few holdouts. Alaska and the District of Columbia still limit drivers to 55 mph, and Hawaii to 60.

What you and Ulysses S. Grant may have in common.

Speed limits were around long before cars; city ordinances against driving a horse-drawn carriage at a gallop go back at least as far as the 17th century. A British law in 1861 limited carriages on open roads to 10 mph, though in the absence of speedometers, enforcement was haphazard.

Ulysses S. Grant, who liked to drive himself, was known as a speed demon, both before and during his presidency, and he was cited more than once. In 1872, toward the end of his first term, he was pulled over in Washington — by William H. West, one of the first black officers — for going recklessly fast, and fined.

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