Sure, but a lot more crashes are caused by poor design (including design that facilititates law-breaking) than mechanical failures or lack of enforcement.
In particular, I want to address the latter: trying to stop people from speeding by having more police patrols simply doesn’t work. The only thing that does work is physically changing the design of the street (narrowing lanes, etc.) to make it scarier and less comfortable for drivers to go too fast. That’s the engineers’ responsibility, not law enforcement’s.
Not on freeways, no. The design principles appropriate for freeways are entirely different than the ones appropriate for city streets. It’s the latter where I suspect most of these Waze “dangerous hotspots” will be, and so it’s the latter that I had in mind when writing my previous comment.
Seriously - the most dangerous roads I’ve ever been on were in Texas where there were 12 lane highways, and crazy people who wanted to drive 100MPH past you in the right-hand lane, all while people are merging on and off the highway.
Doing the speed limit meant that EVERYONE was driving faster than you, which meant that you were a lot more likely to get rear-ended from someone who didn’t see you in time. You have to speed to stay safe, and then you add in construction zones and it’s just a death trap.
Or better yet, if only engineers did their fucking jobs and fixed negligently-designed areas to be less dangerous.
Edit: I say that as an engineer criticizing my own profession from the inside, by the way.
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Sure, but a lot more crashes are caused by poor design (including design that facilititates law-breaking) than mechanical failures or lack of enforcement.
In particular, I want to address the latter: trying to stop people from speeding by having more police patrols simply doesn’t work. The only thing that does work is physically changing the design of the street (narrowing lanes, etc.) to make it scarier and less comfortable for drivers to go too fast. That’s the engineers’ responsibility, not law enforcement’s.
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Not on freeways, no. The design principles appropriate for freeways are entirely different than the ones appropriate for city streets. It’s the latter where I suspect most of these Waze “dangerous hotspots” will be, and so it’s the latter that I had in mind when writing my previous comment.
Seriously - the most dangerous roads I’ve ever been on were in Texas where there were 12 lane highways, and crazy people who wanted to drive 100MPH past you in the right-hand lane, all while people are merging on and off the highway.
Doing the speed limit meant that EVERYONE was driving faster than you, which meant that you were a lot more likely to get rear-ended from someone who didn’t see you in time. You have to speed to stay safe, and then you add in construction zones and it’s just a death trap.
Where is our public transportation option?
I understand why you feel like those were the most dangerous, but statistically, freeways are the safest kind of road. It’s places like stroads that you should really be scared of.