Some road designs are risky because they encourage risky behavior. And "risky" is relative. A good driver should recognize risky road segments and drive even more defensively than normally.
Some road designs are risky because they encourage risky behavior. And "risky" is relative. A good driver should recognize risky road segments and drive even more defensively than normally.
This is true - but it’s hard even for “good” drivers to always understand especially on roads they might not be familiar with.
Example: open space on either side of the road, tends to encourage people to drive faster.
Closing that space (whether by buildings, shrubbery, etc ) will slow the speed.
But I will say there are also “obvious” bad designs - the rare far to short on ramp to merge, where drivers don’t understand how to adjust.
Or the one I most frequently encounter are “blind spots” created by the speed of an intersecting road, where a mirror may be attached to a pole / tree, or a sign reminding people to look left right left, or even instructing where cars should be beyond for a safe pull out.
I know of one intersection near me that both has markers on the road(don’t pull out if cars are at or beyond this marker), and a reminder about looking, but still has a high frequency of accidents.
There's some that are purely due to space constraints, favourite pet-peeve example is a highway with an overpass crossing it.
In the rural case, the offramp will branch off first and the on ramp will be after the overpass and the drivers taking each never meet.
In the space constrained case, theres one extra lane that serves both, where the drivers taking the on-ramp cross paths with those taking the off ramp. This configuration is absolutely cursed!