[ThrustVectoring]

Speed limits are far less important than the psychological design of the road - any given section will communicate what hazards are more or less likely, and drivers are very responsive to these cues.

As a concrete example, I grew up near Seattle and regularly drove on East Lake Sammamish Parkway. This road was built and designed to efficiently carry traffic between Redmond and Issaquah at a speed of 45 miles per hour. It has smooth gentle curves, good sightlines, few driveways and intersections, etc. Sometime in the 90s or 00s people built a ton of really expensive lakefront houses between the parkway and the lake, and the new homeowners got the city to lower the speed limit to 35 (presumably to make it easier to get onto the road)

People generally drive 45 on it anyways. It is a road that practically screams "45 mph is safe" at you, and 35 feels downright glacial. If you lowered the limit to 25 people would probably still regularly do 40 on it - you need some kind of traffic calming as park of a major overhaul of the road to get speeds that are safe for pedestrians there. (And even if you could do this, most households in Sammamish travel to or through either Redmond or Issaquah anyhow, so they need some thoroughfare to do so - at best you're overloading and overstressing the other roads in the network)

[dont__panic]

Oh, totally agreed. Denver commits this sin all over the place, too. Honestly, the only place in the US that doesn't commit this is Boston and some parts of New England... because the roads were designed for horses at 10mph max and pedestrians.