Yes, but that’s a do both situation. Many cars are sold which can exceed 150% of the highest speed limit anywhere in the state, and while there are hard problems in designing speed limiters (e.g. urban interstate sections with GPS bounce) it’s pretty much trivial to say that the advanced computer in your new car can refuse to go over 75mph anywhere in the state if California, or reasonable caps in urban cores where there’s no legal place to go >45mph, etc.

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.

I completely agree.

> Many cars are sold which can exceed 150% of the highest speed limit anywhere in the state

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.

I thought there were some 75mph zones in the high desert but it’s been almost two decades since I last drove there. In any case, though, that’s basically my thought: there’s literally nowhere in the entire state where you can legally drive over 75mph on a public road, so it’s kind of nuts that most drivers can easily go 100-160mph and we just say “don’t do this very easy thing, that’d be dangerous”.

My brother did 108MPH in a non-turbo PT Cruiser 4 cylinder. It would have happily gone faster if there wasn't a speed limiter.

Speed bumps, roundabouts, chokers and chicanes are very useful traffic calming methods for residential streets.

So the way to make driving safer is to make roads more dangerous so people feel afraid of going too fast?

Edit since there are multiple similar replies: I took parent comment to include freeways.

The way to reduce speeds is not to make the road more dangerous but rather to signal the expected speed correctly. The article a sibling commenter linked makes this point:

> [...] 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.

Yup! Bonus points if you can make the road feel more dangerous without actually making it more dangerous. Obstacles that damage paint and bumpers or make disturbing noises without hurting occupants are great. Stuff like K-rails and Flexi-posts are perfect for this. Making roads curvy so that drivers have to maneuver. Making turns sharper and getting rid of slip lanes too.

It’s not more dangerous. It’s clearly limited: your driveway or a roundabout isn’t dangerous, but you don’t speed because it’s not super wide and you don’t expect it to be completely clear of people or things you don’t want to hit.

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!”

Counter-intuitively, yes, in fact. See the great article from Strong Towns, which does a lot of advocacy around building healthy towns: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/8/6/the-key-to-slow...

That works for residential, but how about freeways?

Raise the speed limits such that they're closer to the actual typical speed of traffic, which will reduce the dangers posed to (and by) the "I drive the speed limit" crowd.

Speed bumps are a boon for auto maintenance shops. They force cars to go 10mph or more under the limit to avoid damage. And they greatly affect emergency vehicles.

Build the people so they don't do 100mph in a residential street.

I personally prefer chicanes, bump outs, and roundabouts. Speed bumps suck.

Real roundabouts are great. Circles stuck in a regular intersection that also has stop signs suck.

Agreed, especially the ones with slip lanes. I keep seeing people make left turns at roundabouts going the wrong way or just going straight through.

Traffic calming is a recent term I've seen which seems to mean do things that won't fix any of the outlier behavior we don't like. In Seattle they have "safe streets" where people should only drive on them for local traffic.... So the streets will still have cars on them.

These ideas are ridiculously ineffective and sometimes actively annoying for people who live there. You want to reduce speed? Add speed bumps.

Speed bumps are a type of traffic calming, but traffic calming can include a variety of other techniques that can have other benefits. For example, extending sidewalks in residential areas or adding protective bollards to bike lanes - both encourage drivers to slow down by reducing the size of the lane.

You’re being by downvoted but I’m not sure why (though I can guess). Anyway, you might be happy to know that speed bumps are what is referred to as a traffic calming device; it might seem like an odd new term but it is a normal term in traffic engineering.

Mode filters are a great way to fix this problem. No one will use a private street as a through road if they can't get anywhere outside the neighborhood. Bonus points if you make it so emergency vehicles can get through them.

I know it might seem like a radical idea but we could try something very strange … what if we prosecuted people? I mean I know we are led to believe people only commit crimes like this to get bread for their families but I think we could change sone behavior with just accountability (I know, it’s a kind word f kryptonite). It’s pretty odd for communities to appear helpless because of a loss of common sense.

Perhaps some kind of ticket or official organization that could compel speeders to pay a fine or show up to court?

I had a friend who would be caught regularly and ticketed. Suspended license and everything. He still drove everywhere and did so like a D-Bag. I love the idea of making traffic enforcement way more strict, but it would be better if we could just give people like him viable alternatives to driving and make it impossible to drive in such a manner using good street design.

> Or we could build our roads so that people can't comfortably drive 100MPH with zero feeling of danger.

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.

Multi-use paths, bus lanes, and bike lanes are excellent for emergency vehicles. Also, generally speaking, emergency vehicles aren't supposed to speed. A lot of ambulances have speed governors to prevent going too fast. Also, a lot of the streets where you would use traffic calming are your destination. By the time you hit the traffic calming you are already there pretty much.

When I was stationed in Sacramento I saw a few neighborhoods that tackled this physically and it worked more effectively than I had assumed. They installed double and sometimes triple undulations think smooth short speed bumps that exponentially amplify lift when traveling over them over the speed limit. If traveling over them at the speed limit they are barely noticeable. Speed in a vehicle low to the ground most of the modded street race cars and it will wreck the under carriage, suspension, other things. I've seen it rip the exhaust system, undercarriage lights, spoilers / diffusers right off. Emergency vehicles did not appear to be affected.

With the exception of assholes, people drive for conditions. Period.

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.

> They installed double and sometimes triple undulations think smooth short speed bumps that exponentially amplify lift when traveling over them over the speed limit.

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.

Ambulances do not go 100mph, and cops almost never do that unless they are chasing somebody who is also going very fast

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

Or perhaps we could figure out a way to provide an accessible, legal venue for those activities. Like how skateboarding was a crime for a while (or still is??).

I used to volunteer at a race track. The amount of bureaucratic shit to even get your car on the track makes it not worth it to most people, myself included.

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've gone to drag strips and autocross events in more than one US state and the extent of "bureaucratic shit" was roughly "Do you have a driver's license and a helmet? Is the car leaking fluids? Sign here that you won't sue us." I have the impression things are a bit tighter for road courses.

very much so.

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.

A quick look around the web suggests you can do high performance driving events on serious race tracks with no experience at all. You may be required to do some laps with an instructor in the car and they have tight restrictions on passing. They'll probably want to check that your car isn't falling apart for obvious reasons.

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.

Depends on the track I guess.

It's more about organizations. I'm in the Bay Area, and I've done Luguna Seca a few times through Hooked on Driving.

Fair enough. I know guys have that gone there. This was a much smaller amateur track in rural Canada.

There are plenty of legal venues, and they are popular and widely used. The problem is that the value participants get comes from doing it in the city. It's not the same if they aren't rebelling

The residential street that comes to mind is within 20 miles of two drag strips. People just did it to be turds and because they could.

Unfortunately prohibition in other contexts hasn’t proved all that effective, and most police forces have much higher priorities.

Or maybe we could design society in a way which limits the dependence on automobiles in the first place?

That's my next suggestion, just ban private vehicles from streets, enforce with automated bollards and bang! No speeding.