If everyone is driving at the speed limit then it’s dangerous to be the outlier. Always go with the flow of the rest of the traffic.
Personally, I liked the idea put forward by one of the UK driver advocacy groups a long time ago. Speed enforcement measures should prioritise places with a dangerous hazard, and there should be prominent warning signs on approach in a standard format that show (a) the speed camera sign, (b) the current speed limit and (c) the nature of the hazard, so drivers understand why the limit is there and enforcement is visible and clearly justified.
Somehow, I suspect that if drivers had more trust that speed limits were being set appropriately and expected that they would actually be enforced where they most matter, they would become largely self-policing anyway. Then the actual road police could spend more time dealing with other problems like using a phone behind the wheel or drinking and driving, which are potentially more dangerous than most speeding but much more difficult to enforce without human intervention.
In suburban development especially, there is/was an initiative to make roads safer by increasing the physical tolerances relative to the posted limits. So you have all these residential neighborhoods with big gentle corners in them that any drunk idiot in a shitbox could easily handle at 60mph. And that is exactly what happens.
If 30mph is too fast for a pedestrian encounter, then 30mph needs to feel too fast for maintaining control / avoiding obstacles.
Many American highways actually increase the length and size of the road markings in order to make speed feel slower than it actually is, which was likely a comfort thing at first but clearly it hides the present danger of speed.
That said, it's also important to use these design techniques for clear reasons. Some people don't like motor vehicles and want to deter their use for reasons other than safety. They have been known to argue for road designs that limit capacity or force traffic to go very slowly as a deterrent measure, when perhaps a road designed to support faster speeds could have been just as safe and allowed a more efficient transport system. Sometimes, they even argue for measures that would likely be counterproductive given their stated goals, possibly without understanding why that would be the result. So before you can design a road, you first need to establish what your requirements are and what you're trying to achieve, which is more of a political question than an engineering one.