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It's been shown that if you redesign the street, you can change human behavior on that street including lowering the average speed that drivers choose to drive at.

Designing a wide-open 4 lane boulevard then slapping a 30 mph speed limit on it is a terrible plan, yet how often we do exactly that in our cities.

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The secret is to design terrifying, narrow roads with poor visibility! What an idea.

Look up "traffic calming". There are plenty of well-studied techniques for discouraging excessive speed that don't involve terrifying the drivers or limiting visibility, and make things safer for pretty much everybody involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

It's ironic that it's called traffic calming, because the effect of adding chicanes and speed bumps and similar things is often to make drivers annoyed or angry.

Ultimately though, it does result in the desired reduction in speed. So yes, it works.

Narrow streets without road markings is what we generally do to slow traffic here in Europe. They are safer and slower without the need for speed bumps. We have full sections of the city centre without markings under free-for-all and pedestrians can freely walk on the street. Less crashes and safer strees.

No need to make them poor visibility tho. That would be just stupid.

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