>Make the road as safe to drive at 35MPH as it was at 30MPH, but don't make that fact obvious
What would that even look like? What would you do to increase the safe speed of road? You'd widen the lanes, limit access etc... All of these things are antithetical to making a road safer for non-motorists.
It is decreasing the actual safety of driving at higher speeds. And at lower speeds for that matter. The hope is that people will overcompensate for the danger, so that the safety improvement from driving at lower speed is more than the safety loss from the inherently dangerous design. That is obviously not a desirable trade-off, even when that actually happens.
> What would that even look like? What would you do to increase the safe speed of road? You'd widen the lanes, limit access etc... All of these things are antithetical to making a road safer for non-motorists.
You separate the motorists from the non-motorists. Put sidewalks and bike lanes on the opposite side of each building from the road, so that a building has motorist access on the north and east and non-motorist access on the south and west. Then the building to the north has motorist access on the south and pedestrian access on the north etc.
Build pedestrian tunnels or bridges at busy intersections so that pedestrians and cyclists are never in the road at all.
Houston has a system of underground pedestrian tunnels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_tunnel_system
None of those pedestrians has ever been hit by a car at any speed.
It absolutely does when you measure it against the alternatives instead of the status quo.
The only way you can get an apparent benefit from it is through people overcompensating for danger. People are driving 30MPH, you add some danger, people overcompensate for the danger by driving 25MPH, so the result is as though people were driving 28MPH on the original road. You call this a benefit.
The problem is that it's crazy. You're designing an intentional safety reduction and paying the full cost of it just so that people will overcompensate for it.
What you should be doing is designing a safety improvement that people will undercompensate for. Make the road as safe to drive at 35MPH as it was at 30MPH, but don't make that fact obvious, so that people only drive 2MPH faster even though the road is 5MPH safer. Then people drive 32MPH and the safety level is as though they were driving 27MPH on the original road. Compared to traffic calming you have a safer road and people get where they're going 7MPH faster.