I think the speed limit thing is actually something that traffic engineers think about. You can design roads such that people drive a certain speed. Think about how uncomfortable you'd be driving down a narrow windy road at 60mph, versus the same speed on a multi-lane divided highway. If you want people to drive 20mph, make it hard to navigate at 30mph.

There is probably an art to this, and it's not as easy in practice as the popular books I've read on it claim. My neighborhood in Brooklyn is part of the "neighborhood slow zones" project. That means they put a speed bump midway down the street, which is a popular way to bypass some traffic lights on the way to the BQE. People drive 90 miles an hour right up until the speed bump, slam on the brakes, and then accelerate back up to maximum cruising speed. It doesn't really serve much purpose. (Meanwhile, if you got rid of the curb, and people's lawn furniture / outdoor dining started impinging on available space, it would be impossible to drive more than 5mph. But, there's no political will to block the street like that -- what if a fire truck got stuck and people died in a fire! So it will never ever happen.)

But, like tolerance, it's something we can work on if we choose to.

There is an art to this traffic engineering. You can design so that the majority of people drive slowly. You have narrow roads, shared spare with pedestrians. So the edge of the highway is not clear. All of this leans to 85 percentile speed dropping with a much better environment.

But (there is always a but), for visually impaired people it does not work that well. For example no kerb edges. For idiots (think stronger word than that), they will drive at the still high speed - at then the accident are worse (severity of outcomes) so it fails.

Speed bumps just are not good - better with a chicane or shuttle working which allows an emergency vehicle to go straight through the obstacle.

>If you want people to drive 20mph, make it hard to navigate at 30mph. There is a wide range of driving skills - design sometime has to account for the worst. Making driving test harder - is a political problem not a technical problem. Driver assist means road get easier to navigate. Driver assist enforcing the speed limit ... is a political problem not a technical problem.

I think something like gay rights provides a great example of hundreds of millions of people becoming drastically less judgmental over just a few decades. Of course it involves changes in the law as well, but massive cultural shifts do happen!

We shouldn’t describe the past as extremely one thing. Because when I discovered there was a gay street and plenty of gay clubs in Berlin up to 1934, I started to entirely distrust a lot of things I had been taught about the past. The wedge got driven even further when I learnt Archimedes didn’t say Eureka, Galileo didn’t say “E pur se mueve!” to the pope (so… was he ever imprisoned? did Christians even question the round earth?) and the ILO 1930 treaty against slavery included all humans… except men. Until 1957. Which quite relativizes the narrative about women’s suffrage.

It’s dangerous to transform History into storytelling for one cause, because it makes people distrust it profoundly.

Yeah for sure, that's not to say it was always a certain way or that it's an inevitable march towards anything, just that massive shifts in culture do happen (and I think as your comment illustrates, cultures changes much faster than we think!).

We tend to think it's easier to change the law than to change how people feel, and that's not always true.

There are plausible paths to changing behavior and morality. Prohibition was a failure, but we have had great success reducing the number of nicotine users over the years through public health campaigns.

It is both. Speed limits work because majority of the people respect them. Cops can’t control the entire population, if majority choose to misbehave. This is what it feels like online. People seem to relish in posting other’s misfortune, mistakes etc with little consequences. They do things online that they wouldn’t dare to do in real life.

If the attitude doesn’t change, no amount of laws would help

>It is both. Speed limits work because majority of the people respect them. Cops can’t control the entire population, if majority choose to misbehave. This is what it feels like online.

Have you never driven on an interstate highway outside of rush hour?

People go the speeds they deem reasonable for the conditions. Sometimes this is in the ballpark of the speed limit. In many situations it is much faster. People don't follow unenforceable rules unless they agree with them.

If "the majority are misbehaving" the definition of "misbehaving' needs to be adjusted.

> Have you never driven on an interstate highway outside of rush hour?

Yeah some of these comments are from people who obviously don’t drive much. If you are driving the speed limit on a big highway you are legitimately at risk of causing an accident.