There are many counter-intuitive effects in traffic engineering. Widening lanes has often been done in the name of safety, but the effect is that drivers feel safer driving faster, and the rates of deadly crashes rise.
This suggests to me that to make roads safer, we might want to design them so that drivers feel they need to drive slower and more safely. Narrow the lanes where they are too wide, add roundabouts instead of multi-level exchanges, allow tighter curves. Especially useful for cities, since these changes would give back land for non-highway uses.
This suggests to me that to make roads safer, we might want to design them so that drivers feel they need to drive slower and more safely. Narrow the lanes where they are too wide, add roundabouts instead of multi-level exchanges, allow tighter curves. Especially useful for cities, since these changes would give back land for non-highway uses.