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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

"It's kind of useless to blame drivers as there is little that can be done to resolve that problem."

What makes you say that? Most accidents are driver error. The stats show that CDL drivers, who undergo more stringent testing, have a lower accident rate than others.

"Engineer them for safety rather than traffic throughput."

What would that look like? Even if you replace stop signs with roundabouts, the drivers still need knowledge of how to safely navigate them. If you're talking about reducing speed (technically the most effect if enforced systematically), how do we ensure enforcement?

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Roads in the US are too straight and too wide to force drivers to be more deliberate in how they drive. They should have curves, speed bumps, etc. In general anything to force drivers to drive slower around pedestrians, and to reduce the number of times traffic streams cross each other perpendicularly.

"Roads in the US are too straight and too wide to force drivers to be more deliberate in how they drive."

I guess it depends. Most pedestrians are in cities or towns. The roads there may be straight, but not necessarily wide.

I'm also not sure how a road being straight and wide is a negative. Making them more narrow and winding is arguably less safe. Even if people reduce their speed, you present new issues of reduced line of sight, decreasing available reaction time. You also have reduced performance (braking on a turn vs straight).

Many areas do have some speed bumps. Mostly these are residential or near crosswalks.

It's not about making the roads more narrow or winding per se. It's about deliberately slowing cars down where they need to, through the road design. See this video for example: https://youtu.be/bglWCuCMSWc

Besides that, roads in the US are generally poorly classified. They're often trying to both function as both high throughput roads and destination serving streets. Such hybrid roads are known as "stroads" and they're bad for everyone involved. Stroads are bad for moving cars fast due to the many conflict points (driveways, intersections, etc.) that force drivers to constantly slow down. They are also bad at serving destinations because the many conflict points make stroads very dangerous, especially if you're not in a car. See this video for example: https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM

> In general anything to force drivers to drive slower

But never, ever force the handful of car manufacturers to electronically limit the top speed of their products?

Note: for the top-end German marques, this is just a configuration file change: they are already limited to 250km/h.

It depends on how that limiting will work. Ideally you still want relatively fast speeds on interstate type roads while much lower speeds on city streets. So it's not as simple as using the existing limiting feature and dropping it to 20mph (unless we want that to be the max speed everywhere). We would need a different, flexible framework.

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