The problem here is that changing built infrastructure is expensive and challenging: the most aggressive drivers will fight every change tooth and nail, there will be impassioned arguments about freedom (except for the freedom to be a pedestrian and live, of course) and you’ll hear a million fantasies about how you sometimes need to LARP being an ambulance driver during emergencies in highly improbable situations where driving 90mph to the hospital is a) medically necessary and b) doesn’t result in more injuries. We are seeing improvements but that’s a huge lift, whereas California telling car manufacturers to enable a feature they already have much of the hardware and data for from all of the assist/navigation/self-driving work has the very convenient aspect of not requiring thousands of CalTrans and local projects to be planned, survive approval, and be built to start saving lives.
What I would like is to pair this with mandatory improvements as part of routine maintenance: every urban road resurfacing, ADA upgrade, etc. project could include safety improvements so those don’t require expensive new projects which might involve ripping up roads worked on just a few years earlier.
One example I like are continuous sidewalks / raised crosswalks where cars have to go up an incline to pass through a pedestrian space or bulbing out corners so drivers have to slow down. You can’t easily deploy those everywhere but there are a ton of areas where it’d be easy and important around schools, parks, etc. and if you could flip it so the planners would have to get an exception approved _not_ to use a safe design, cities could roll that into normal maintenance and be much safer a decade later.
Is there any popular new car that can't do 106 mph on level ground, no wind? I can find a few extra-wheezy cars with published top speeds lower than that, but even a Prius, base Civic, or base Corolla can exceed 110 mph.
Edit since there are multiple similar replies: I took parent comment to include freeways.
> [...] The premise is simple: drivers will make occasional mistakes—veer a bit out of their lane, fail to brake hard enough, etc.—-and if the street is wide, with high visibility in all directions, and free of immediate obstacles such as trees and fences, those mistakes won’t be catastrophic. The problem: this street feels too forgiving to a driver. Too safe and comfortable. So drivers speed up. The engineers didn’t account for this aspect of human psychology.
Drivers behave as expected when they can't see around obstacles, the lane feels tight, and there are curves and other features that reduce visibility. These roads aren't inherently more dangerous, they just give drivers less margin for taking excessive risks.
Most traffic calming measures are similar: break up long sight lines, narrow the lanes, and tighten the corners so people look at the road and think “I’m driving past homes where pedestrians are” rather than “freeway, time to see if I can avoid dropping under the speed limit the whole way!”
Build the people so they don't do 100mph in a residential street.
These ideas are ridiculously ineffective and sometimes actively annoying for people who live there. You want to reduce speed? Add speed bumps.
What about emergencies? If cops, firefighters or ambulances need to get somewhere quick?
> I've seen people drag racing on residential streets because they are 50 feet wide with clear zones on each side.
People drag race in residential areas because they feel they can do so with impunity. If politicians decided to take on this problem head on, we can solve it easily. Make drag racing and noise pollution with cars/motorcycles/etc in residential areas a serious crime ( that includes prison time ). Problem solved.
The flow of traffic is always the safest speed. NHTSA and German authorites have papers on this.
It is possible to physically slow cars down with narrower roads, speed bumps, one lane chicanes, etc. It works. Very well.
Four lane split highway with a 30mph sign next to a police station? That's a speed trap and everyone knows it.
You must have dumb drag racers where you live but then again, most drag racers are dumb to begin with. Our drag racers remember where these speed bumps are and just adjust to them. You literally hear these morons slow down and rev up again in the middle of the night.
Frankly, it's the noise that's the biggest issue with me. I wouldn't care that much if they raced quietly. I'd prefer extremely heavy fines, loss of license and even prison for anyone causing excessive noise pollution in residential neighborhoods. Especially at night.
Drag racing is unfortunately impossible to stop with force because we lack the political will to do anything like that in California. Narrowing streets and making it difficult to race or do donuts is more politically realistic
Used to find back corners of industrial parks to have fun. Cops were cool with it. More than a few were there off duty doing the same.
I dealt with tech inspections and people would try to go on the track with worn out brakes and suspension all the time. Which is dumb but. So are people.
Even getting to that point means you've gone through the local amateur licence process, shown up to training days, etc.
You have to prove to a bunch of gatekeeping boomers you deserve to race.
If you want to do wheel to wheel racing with other drivers, then there's a license requirement involving a couple days of training with a four digit price tag.
Maybe we have different thresholds for what counts as "bureaucratic shit", but there seem to be some good options to drive fast under controlled conditions and compare your results to others. The most exciting and dangerous versions of it have some gatekeeping and I imagine most of the participants prefer it that way.