No driver expects to hit a pedestrian anyway (what ped expects to be hit?), and so there’s no credible threat to decrease their speed. Needing to swerve to follow the sharply turning road will work much better, won’t require enforcement, and won’t seem like fascism to the drivers.

http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/11/18/streetfilms-a-new-vision-for-the-upper-west-side/

Moreover, drivers know that the road itself speaks to them about how fast they should be traveling. And the roads are themselves scream “fifty!” half the time.

A more just society might do away with speed limits, recommend cruising speeds w/ variances on highways, and strictly enforce _reckless driving_ bans on urban areas, with tightly built surface streets that physically prohibit speeding.

Putting big signs up that say “30mph!” ’cause there’s houses coming up, with fourteen-foot lanes and ten-foot shoulders and nice banked curves, ain’t gonna do nothin about speed until it’s too late.

I live on a Brooklyn side street, and speeding is physically impossible due to the need to execute a 90deg turn to enter my street. It’s perfectly safe, you could play stickball in the street most days.

Another way of putting this: Cops in America don’t ever ticket you for reckless driving, they bust you for exceeding the speed limit; and they mostly do it in places where traveling extremely fast is _proper_, say on highways, freeways which were designed for 75mph traffic but then tamped down to 55mph artificially by Federal laws before many of us were born.

There is no necessary correlation between exceeding a posted limit and being reckless, and even less correlation between who the cops ticket and who should be de-licensed. When’s the last time you saw a cop give a shit about someone rolling through a red light, overtaking on the right, cutting over a sidewalk in an extremely wide turn?

Four miles over the limit, though. That’s two points on your license!

Surface-street redesigns are the way. The Upper West Side project will show America how.