How do I know this? Because speeding is almost never an enforcement problem. Evidence has accumulated over the years that when the posted speed is significantly lower than the design speed of the street (that is, the speed at which the physical conditions—lane width, sight lines, the presence or absence of visual or physical obstructions, etc.—make it feel comfortable to drive), design speed wins. Put simply, most drivers speed, and nearly all drivers speed when the street itself is telling them to.

What's worse, "design speed" is often determined according to worst-case conditions: how fast can you drive on a street when it's pouring rain, for example. In normal conditions, then, drivers are comfortable stomping the gas a little harder. According to a research report from the Federal Highway Administration's Public Roads journal:

For speed limits to be effective... they must appear reasonable to most drivers and correctly reflect the maximum safe speed for prevailing conditions. Since the underlying criteria and assumptions in the design speed concept are based on long-standing comfort and worst-case conditions, such as braking on wet pavement, the comfort of a blindfolded passenger in a 1930s vehicle, and the reaction times of impaired drivers, it should not be surprising to find that the speeds of many motorists driving under normal conditions safely exceed the minimum design speed.

Wide, unobstructed, drag-strip streets tell drivers to speed, and most do.

In Akron, we can add to this basic fact of psychology another problem. Akron has a street network designed for traffic volumes much greater than exist today. And this means dangerously high-speed traffic.

Angie Schmitt, a Cleveland-based journalist who is a writer and editor at Streetsblog, describes here what she calls Akron's "wide-street problem":

The initiative stems from basic demographic reality: Akron—like many cities across the upper Midwest—has lost about one-third of its population since its industrial heyday in the 1960s. And also like many cities that have lost a lot of population—Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo—wide, empty streets linger unneeded. Population loss causes a well-known set of problems — abandoned houses, vacant lots — but it is also causes a transportation problem. Wide, traffic-free roads encourage speeding—which can also be an equity issue if the urban poor live mostly in the depopulated areas, as they do in Akron. Akron Planning Director Jason Segedy identified roughly two dozen four-lane streets in the city that carry less than 10,000 cars a day, meaning a two-lane road would easily suffice.

Segedy himself describes this process as "right-sizing" Akron's wide streets.

Akron's Stroad Problem

We at Strong Towns would describe it similarly, but with one additional, crucial insight: it's not just about the size of the street, it's about the failure to be clear and honest with ourselves about a street's purpose. A hugely disproportionate share of traffic fatalities occur not on neighborhood streets, and not on fully grade-separated freeways, but on stroads.