>I've always thought it was a perverse conclusion that the way to make someone operate heavy machinery more safely is to increase cognitive load of the people o

>I've always thought it was a perverse conclusion that the way to make someone operate heavy machinery more safely is to increase cognitive load of the people operating them. But the catch is that people doing things optimize for static cognitive load. In practice this means slowing down so "stuff" that demands thinking happens less readily when other things take up brain cycles. So you can get them to drive slower by adding "stuff" to the road. There are right and wrong ways to do this. Generally you try not to limit visibility. Remember, the goal is safer, not slower. And slower is just a crude proxy for that. With big multi-lane roads your best bet is generally to try and normalize traffic speeds or segregate traffic based on speed (truck lanes, bike lanes, sidewalks, etc). >Why not have a the straight roads you describe, with rigid automatic enforcement and penalities that take dangerous drivers off the road? Because in a democracy with even enforcement they vote out the people who implemented such a system and with uneven enforcement it just turns into a system of extracting revenue from whichever groups nobody cares about. Orwellian crap like that simply doesn't fly in most of the world.