Is this the price for saving lives, or do I misunderstand anything? Does the 2+1 road replace 1+1 roads (which is probably a lot more dangerous)?
I take the 2+1 any day.
The newer 2+1 roads have cable barriers in the middle, so even a drunk or sleeping oncoming driver won't kill you. They just total their own car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_barrier
Source: Being Swedish.
Sweden was just lucky to have built such wide 1+1 roads as the norm, so a large part of the major highways were (realatively) easily and cheaply convertible.
The safety difference from 1+1 is huge, and the cost of conversion is negligible compared to a rebuild into a real 2+2 road.
So yes, you can definitely reduce accidents by forcing everyone into high traffic situations where they have no choice but to drive extremely slowly.
In IT security, you can also reduce hacked computers by making so many security regulations that nobody can actually use the computers. It does work, but nobody really gets their job done.
Or at least, in the case of the state department, it works until your secretary of state moves all of her email onto her own server to avoid your regulations and you end up with a political firestorm.
At some point you probably want to try find solutions that optimize safety and actually getting something done at the same time. Creating traffic isn't a very good solution in the long run, I think.
Well, they have about the same accident rate as walking, and walking is even faster!
> In IT security, you can also reduce hacked computers by making so many security regulations that nobody can actually use the computers. It does work, but nobody really gets their job done.
On the contrary, imposing ridiculous restrictions will cause users to become very creative in bypassing them, thus negating any positive effect they might have.