Especially re: road safety, this is the American approach. Build with unsafe designs according to decades out-of-date engineering practice and design philosophy. Blame enforcement when things inevitably go wrong (which they are doing – most American towns are heading towards financial insolvency because of their idiotic design and planning patterns and American roads are among if not the least safe ones in the developed world).

In threads about roads, people will inevitably bring up two pieces of perfectly-harmonized bullshit. First, that the drivers are just particularly bad in their context. Second, that there is way too little enforcement. Both are total bullshit. Drivers are basically the same everywhere. It is literally not possible for the police to enforce enough to make a dent on road safety.

When some municipality decides they want to get serious about safe roads, they do so primarily through better engineering of the roads. It’s proven effective. And bonus points: the same design practices that make roads safer encourage better development patterns creating safer and more pleasant streets for EVERYONE. Especially people outside of cars. Which creates a virtuous cycle of multi-modal development patterns. Safer streets mean more people are on them, and not just in cars. This leads to lower crime, more productive neighborhood businesses, more aesthetic neighborhoods (since people are actually there to look at them, they care how they look now). Everything just gets better when you use better road engineering.

But no, we still rely on AASHTO standards and their ilk which rate roads according to “level of service”. They literally put everything, including safety, as secondary to how many cars the road can move.

And that’s not even jumping down the rabbit hole of what it means for my country to be a police state. How insane it is that we have laws that criminalize completely mundane, normal, predictable behavior that can be selectively-enforced or used as pretexts for unnecessary violence.