[lotu]

Marking the road at its engineered speed is ineffective. People overwhelmingly do not use speed limits to decide how fast they drive. They look at how wide and straight the road is and how many things they see. The problem is we built a lot of streets that are engineered to be 50mph roads in residential neighborhoods. People then ignore the 25mph sign and drive 50mph and hit little children playing outside their home. Rebuilding and rerouting the road is impractical, so how do we fix the problem? Empirical evidence shows that by adding "distracting things" people drive slower, and this results in few fatalities.

You are thinking of them as "distractions" but counter intuitively it might better to think of them "focus holders". Imagine your job is to sit in an empty room with a single button and at random times, a light turns on and you need to push the button within half a second. If this happens every several seconds or so, this is pretty easy, but if it only happens after an hour or so your mind will be wandering and your reaction time will be shit. Now imagine instead you are given a platforming video game like Mario or Hollow Knight, and every time a certain character appears on screen need to push the Y button. This sounds like something that is easy to do for hours, even if the specific character appears infrequently, it would even be enjoyable. Adding those elements like trees, turns and bumps are the same idea, it ensures the drivers focus is always on the road where it needs to be.

Also some people just don't care and race down wide straight roads as fast as they can. The only way to slow these people down is to make it impossible to go extremely fast. I can think of this play ground near my house which is across the street from a school. In orders to stop people speeding down this straight street, the placed large rocks in the middle of the road, so you have to dive this zig zag pattern. I sure this can be somewhat frustrating for drivers but it's now impossible to navigate this road at more than ~20 mph which is what we want.

As for moving interactions I think the idea of not having pedestrian crossings at intersections is infeasible. Though it might work if you were building a new city from scratch. When you are walking in a city you are going to cross multiple blocks. Walking ten+ blocks to get somewhere is so normal it’s not something you even think about. Crossing in the middle of the block would at least double and could triple or quadruple the length of the of a walk and city dwellers would simply not do it and cross at intersections. They already universally ignore traffic lights, and aren't going to walk out of their way dozens of times a day.

I could imagine a city that was designed around walking and all the shops and homes were on car free streets, with streets behind the houses, like alleyways or underground. That I could see working, but the problems with implementation are obvious.