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by c0pium 874 days ago
Speed limits aren’t the problem because people ignore them and drive by feeling. The correct solution is not more enforcement but rather better design to reduce the speed that feels right. Narrower lanes, chicanes, barriers between pedestrians and vehicles, roundabouts instead of stop signs, the usual playbook that people ignore because it’s expensive.

More enforcement is what we tried with drugs, how’d that go?

2 comments

I agree with you, for example, traffic calming devices (speed bumps, roundabouts, chicanes) are incredibly effective. However I think enforcement needs to be rethought, cars are essentially just computers now and they know what the speed limit is, so why don't they automatically limit the speed of cars?

If you want to race, that's fine, but don't do it on public roads. Go to a race track that's designed for that.

And also agree on drugs, we should just legalize everything IMO. Prohibition has never worked, anyone who wants to do drugs are going to do them, and we're better off helping than harming people by filling up the prisons.

I agree with you, but there are a great deal of drug use metrics that have declined over time so maybe choose a different analogy.
If you look into what those metric changes are related to, you’ll find that it’s almost entirely uncorrelated with stiffer incarceration and zero tolerance policies, which was my point.