“I love it,” Ted Houghton said in 2006, when as a member of the State Transportation Commission he voted to raise the speed limit (he is now the chairman of the commission). “It’ll be the Texas autobahn.”

Mr. Houghton’s remarks — and the speed limit that inspired them — have been rendered moot, though not by a rival state. When it comes to speeding on the highways, only Texas messes with Texas. Commissioners voted last month to raise the speed limit to 85 m.p.h. on another road, a section of State Highway 130 between the Austin and San Antonio areas that is under construction.

Officials with the Texas Department of Transportation — which is overseen by the transportation commission — said the highway was designed and tested for high-speed travel. “Safety is our top priority,” Veronica Beyer, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement. “And tests have shown the designated speed is a safe one.”

When it opens in November, the 41-mile toll road will have the highest speed limit in the United States. According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, the only other state with a posted speed limit that rivals Texas is Utah, with 80 m.p.h. zones on parts of I-15.

Texans do not necessarily love speed so much as they hate limits. In a state where legislators repealed a law requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets, granting drivers permission to go 5 m.p.h. faster struck many as a reasonable move, though a number of groups expressed concern, including the governors’ association.

The commissioners’ decision came after the Legislature approved a bill last year allowing officials to set speeds of up to 85 m.p.h. on some highways. The bill was signed into law by Gov. Rick Perry on June 17, 2011, almost 11 years to the day that he and his driver were pulled over outside Austin for going 75 in a 55-m.p.h. zone.

As Mr. Perry, then the lieutenant governor, approached the state trooper — the footage from the dashboard camera remains popular on YouTube — he uttered what has become a kind of motto of Texas driving: “Why don’t you just let us get on down the road?”

But the rising speed limits have as much to do with topography as ideology. As the Works Progress Administration guide to Texas put it, Texas is so big that if it were folded over with its northern line as a hinge, Brownsville would be 120 miles from Canada. It takes 8 hours to drive from El Paso to San Antonio — following the speed limit — and 10 hours from Amarillo to Houston. In 2000, Mr. Perry was on a 90-minute trip from San Antonio to Austin, a blink of an eye in Texas time.

“We’ve got miles and miles of miles and miles,” said Jerry Patterson, the state’s land commissioner.

“There’s lots of Interstates going through wide open spaces.”

Mr. Patterson’s comments were transcribed with difficulty, because he and his turbocharged, six-cylinder Ford pickup were speeding on I-10 west of Houston as he spoke on his cellphone. “I’m right now doing 79, and I’m going with the traffic,” he said. “The speed limit here I think is 70. If I was doing 70, I’d have cars backed up behind me, I’d have folks that are trying to jump in and out to change lanes to get around me. The majority of the citizenry do not drive 70 miles an hour in a 70-miles-an-hour zone.”

At a gas station off I-10 in Sonora, Mike Curtis, 58, expressed support for the new 85 m.p.h. limit. He had been doing 83 before he stopped to get gas, his mother by his side. It was not so much that Texans are in a rush to get somewhere, he said, but that the somewhere was usually hours away. He was in the middle of a 350-mile trip back home to Sattler, Tex.

“You can’t piddle around at 55 miles an hour unless you want to leave two days early,” Mr. Curtis said. “We’re not in New York. We’re in the West. There is a world of difference.”

J. Eric Taylor, 59, an I.T. project manager from California who lived in Texas years ago and still works in the state occasionally, remembers the day he was on a two-lane road and saw, in his rearview mirror, a young man in a pickup truck come up quickly behind him. “He was very eager to get past me,” he said. “But we came upon a funeral coming the other way. As we approach the funeral, everyone pulls over.”

Mr. Taylor parked behind the pickup on the side of the road and watched the young man remove his cowboy hat and hold it over his heart as the funeral procession drove past. “And then the moment they took off,” Mr. Taylor said, “he burned rubber, threw gravel, put his hat back on and took off like a bat out of hell.”