Check out my other comment in response. I did wrote a lot on that.
> The issue for the USA is the willingness of the average Joe driving their car to have their privileges taken away, that's not a technical issue but a political/social one.
That isn't really true. Many of the changes don't actually take away any privileges. In fact, many of those changes can be done improving both safety and threwput.
Most people don't really have input. There are road design standards, and US engineers mostly just implement by the standard. Those standard could and should be changed.
Yes there is a deep political issue to really improve everything. But there is a absolutely huge amount of low hanging fruit that would be massively better. And in fact, people in the US, like people everywhere else do actually generally support changes that improve safety.
There is just a totally dysfunctional and broken engineering culture supported by a completely incompetent government.
I truly believe its not individual people and their privilege driving this.
Once you get past much of the easy changes, there might be things that cause some pushback, but a lot of it doesn't.
Drivers do not care about throughput, they care about what they perceive will benefit themselves to make their journeys in a shorter time. Lowering speed limits doesn't give them that impression (but it does increase safety and throughput), reducing car lanes to make space for exclusive bus lanes has the same effect, shared modality streets (like trams + busses + cars) also help to increase throughput but drivers don't see that way, they only think they will be slowed down by the other traffic.
It's a big political change, the car-centric culture of the USA does not allow for much progress in this since it will require a multi-decade concerted effort to actually tackle the problem. If a mayor changes the standards for roads (or governor, or whomever is responsible for it) there will be backlash and a potential political weapon to run against them next election, the next incumbent will have to deliver on the promise of giving cars more space since a reduction for just 2-4 years will create issues that require many other infrastructure projects to compensate for, and you end up at the same spot after a few cycles of this.
It's not rational, it's dysfunctional, but it's the culture that the USA created, to change it will require a lot of political capital to be burnt and many administrations in a row implementing projects that move the needle of this culture to something else.
As I pointed out, I was not suggesting changes like changing car lanes to bus lanes.
And the 'lets just change top level highly visible regulation' without actually addressing the underlying infrastructure are what I am talking about.
> Drivers do not care about throughput
There are places where they removed red lights and put stop signs. People complained. Then the reversed it, guess what, people complained even more so they revered it again.
People don't know what they want, they will simply complain about changes if you actually ask them.
So, the solution just do systematic infrastructure changes bit by bit, without any grand top level political retric. Instead of top level 'all speed limits are now different' you go road by road, reducing it where it makes the most sense with the least amount of resistance. If anybody complains, just reverse it. This intersection is no longer with a red light. That's much harder to organize against. Most places will not organize a political revolution because one local intersection is different, and then 1 year later another one, and so on.
Again there is so much low hanging fruit. Like putting red lights on the sides, where pedestrians are rather then on top. There is not gone be a political movement against that, but it improves safety for pedestrians quite a bit.
In places where you have cycling gutters, and parking you can swap them, moving cycling inside the parking. Again, no removing car lanes.
You can turn 4-lane roads into a 3-lane with turn lane. Same threwput. You can even claim you are doing this to increase the amount of parking. They managed to do this even in Oklahoma maybe the most unsafe and pro car city in the US.
You can narrow lanes and turn parallel parking into angled parking, again this isn't an 'anti-car' move. More parking, and no more parallel parking. What a win for car owners.
The list goes on, those are low hanging fruit that not gone cause a political revolution.
Again, my point here is that even if you are pro-car, US is terrible in both safety, threwput and cost. Even by their own currently existing requirements they are doing a terrible job. Often there isn't a need to even change any political rules, simply the road department has to do a better job.
> multi-decade concerted effort to actually tackle the problem.
You can do much of that by slightly changing the standards and doing it bit by bit when re-stripping roads and doing other work.
If you want to change the big stuff, yes, that's going to be more political.
Norway (and I believe Sweden as well) have their own programs aiming for zero road fatalities, it's a dream but there's an aim and concerted effort has made traffic accidents less fatal to all road participants (pedestrians, bikes, and drivers).
The technical solutions are low tech: slower speed limits for traffic in denser populated areas, removing space for cars in cities to make drivers more attentive, roundabouts instead of crossings. The issue for the USA is the willingness of the average Joe driving their car to have their privileges taken away, that's not a technical issue but a political/social one.