Phones are easy to blame here, but nobody wants to talk about speeding and dangerous driving, which seems to have become totally normalized. People treat speed limits as a minimum speed suggestion. There's also close to no enforcement of traffic laws from what I've seen, yet lots of people are outraged about too many bicycles (even though the number of people killed by bicycles is a tiny fraction of those killed by cars).
Do you also believe the laws of physics are just an opinion? If physics is an opinion, then I believe that F = ma, which means that more of m and a means more F, which means more injuries and death.
Speed limits aren’t the problem because people ignore them and drive by feeling. The correct solution is not more enforcement but rather better design to reduce the speed that feels right. Narrower lanes, chicanes, barriers between pedestrians and vehicles, roundabouts instead of stop signs, the usual playbook that people ignore because it’s expensive.
More enforcement is what we tried with drugs, how’d that go?
I agree with you, for example, traffic calming devices (speed bumps, roundabouts, chicanes) are incredibly effective. However I think enforcement needs to be rethought, cars are essentially just computers now and they know what the speed limit is, so why don't they automatically limit the speed of cars?
If you want to race, that's fine, but don't do it on public roads. Go to a race track that's designed for that.
And also agree on drugs, we should just legalize everything IMO. Prohibition has never worked, anyone who wants to do drugs are going to do them, and we're better off helping than harming people by filling up the prisons.
If you look into what those metric changes are related to, you’ll find that it’s almost entirely uncorrelated with stiffer incarceration and zero tolerance policies, which was my point.
The people doing that don’t care about the speed limit already. Set it whatever you’d like you aren’t making the road any safer or affecting these people’s speeds.
