I'd argue speeding is even worse, but to each their own.
The city has (imo) a psychotic driving culture, but is still roughly middle-of-the-road in us news and world report's ranking of most dangerous US cities to drive in.
Large speed deltas are (conjecture I haven't bothered to research) probably unsafe under any conditions. Exceeding safe speeds for the conditions is obviously dangerous, but the size and design of the road and it's lanes are some of those conditions.
I don't particularly care which, but in order to minimize speed deltas I do think it should be incumbent on the state to either set low speed limits and fastidiously police them or else set speed limits that are close to the natural speeds a given road supports to cut down the gap between people who drive the road as it feels and those who drive the signage.
https://dot.ca.gov/programs/safety-programs/setting-speed-li....
By now the evidence is clear: people will drive at the speeds they feel comfortable at given their environment (sight lines, spaciousness, density, etc.). Just putting a sign on the side of a wide and spacious road is not going to do much to affect driving speeds.
The most interesting one to me was how tree-lined streets encourage slower driving without any speed limit signs, because it feels more like a tunnel and less like an open road.
Somewhere near me (south UK) has a dual carriageway that approaches a roundabout. There is a fence on the side of the road as you approach the roundabout, so that you cannot see what traffic on the adjacent road is doing, forcing you to slow down on the approach, rather than maintaining a higher speed when it appears you might get away with it. Seems to work quite well.
In Germany you get fined and ticketed for it. In NA you don't. It's that simple.
That's the wrong approach for a left turn.
> Imagine actually having protocols around traffic flow, and following them!
Like limits on the magnitude of vehicular velocity?
That depends on the highway. If it's a limited access motorway, like the interstates, Autobahn, or M-class then sure. Perhaps not coincidentally, that is where the right lane rule you propose is mandated.
Otherwise, it fails often. Reality is messy.
If you truly want to make the roads safer, follow the posted speed limits. (Energy follows the square of the speed.) Also, always ensure you leave enough room to stop (the "2 second rule").
I observed that it especially works best in concert with a rule that people entering/merging from the right have the right-of-way, since this reduces uncertainty around "who will go?" that I often witness here in NA (where "keep right to except to pass" is merely a suggestion, or not enforced even if enshrined in law).
Regarding speed limit, I'm not arguing against speed limits or adhering to them, and indeed the more consistent the speed of traffic, the safer it is. On that note, my observation is that simply adhering to the speed limit (and attempting to stay at that speed) means regularly passing vehicles -- that is, in most cases, people are indeed following speed limits and a "keep right except to pass" policy correlates well with maintaining consistent speed and flow of traffic. People who want to drive slower can stick to the right lane without any hassle or problem (it's accepted and normal for them to drive slow there), and those who are driving faster can safely pass and then return to that right lane. If there are deep flaws in this process, I'm absolutely not seeing them and have not observed them.
(yes, of course, the "two-second" rule makes sense and is a minimum IMO - I imagine if more people followed this, crashes would be massively reduced)
I almost want to become a cop just so I can write tickets for this.
I don’t know what you really mean by acceptable, but there are plenty of roads with a 65 mph speed limit where 80 miles an hour is perfectly safe, and there are of course plenty of roads with a 65 mph speed limit where 70 mph is and unsafely fast. And there are road conditions in all of those roads where 45 mph would be on unsafe. It is difficult to make blanket statements about what a safe speed is knowing nothing other than the posted speed limit.
To put the same point in a different context, remember that it wasn’t really that long ago that there was a national 55 mph speed limit, and many of the same interstates that used to have a 55 mph speed limit now have an 80 mph speed limit.
IMO roads with 80 MPH speed limits are much safer. Even the crazy folks don’t go much over, so you don’t get a huge delta in speed, which is a lot more dangerous than any absolute number.
There's stretches of flat, straight-ish interstate in the US that continue for dozens of miles with near-perfect visibility. Sometimes, there's no traffic. Go 120 for all I care, just slow down when you're near something.
Or the road is in good condition.
Or that your tires are rated for that speed (T or higher).
There's really only one solution that works to prevent speeding: road design. Make roads less straight, less big. Add more obstacles and flow interrupts.
Private cars are obsolete anyway. Replace more lanes with bus lanes and be done with the problem altogether. It's frankly insane that we allow people to operate a private car with nothing more than a license they got at 16 years old and never tested again for for the 70+ years after they'll be driving.
More space, time, and energy efficient transportation options have existed for nearly 200 years. These options move more people further more quickly and safely than private cars. Furthermore, these options are more environmentally friendly, and improving them as technology advances can be done through retrofitting. My friend does retrofitting of classic cars with electric drive, it's prohibitively expensive for mass adoption.
These options being cable cars and trains. Modern electric busses are pretty good too.
It seems quite obvious to me the private car is obsolete. What advantage is there considering that mass adoption of the private vehicle leads to more death, more environmental harm, and less people getting to less places, slower, and more pissed off because they had to stay focused the entire drive?
Obsolete doesn't mean, "I don't like it so it should be gone".
But... this simply isn't true. Group transportation is the only viable way across the least dense places on earth: oceans. You almost always take a plane with hundreds of other people on it. Not to mention the fact that high speed rail is vastly superior way to get across a country than a car. Taiwan has several massive freeways running the length of the west side of the nation. The drive time north to south is between 6-10 hours depending on traffic. In the high speed rail, it is 2 hours, every time, to the minute. It moves 130,000 people per day, far, far more than the capacity of the freeways.
Exactly, retrofitting cars is not economical. Right now everyone drives combustion vehicles, those will all essentially need to be thrown away or recycled as we switch to electric. Think of all that waste. Meanwhile a diesel train needs the engine, or whole engine car at worst, swapped, and a third rail installed or overhead power installed. Every other aspect of the thing can remain the same: the cars, the tracks, the stations, everything. For a retrofit of an entire city's train transit system, you have maybe 20 or 30 train engine cars in the garbage or to be recycled, maybe some supporting diesel fuel infrastructure (the piping for which can be re-used for power transmission if necessary), that's it. Meanwhile millions of cars are about to be trashed or need to be recycled. You can't even reuse their tires.
I don't like cars, you're right, mostly because they keep killing people, but I'm really not trying to be annoying here, I literally see no advantage. Even in the USA, one of the more rural-focused countries on earth, you have a deep history of using public transit to access the remote regions of the country, that you simply stopped using over the last hundred years. I have had the delight of visiting some of these old train lines and encountered stations sprinkled all throughout places that are now accessible only by car - and some of these small towns even had street or cable cars for local transportation connections! You had it, you just got rid of it. And nowadays you can have even better - combine trains and streetcars with public electric bicycle infrastructure (take your pick of tens if not hundreds of cities with functioning examples) and you have a wonderful modern transportation system that serves the needs of people rural or otherwise, without poisoning the environment and without getting people killed every day.