Here are five of my suggestions, based on decades of driving experience, for making roads safer, easier, more practical, and more pleasant to drive on. You can discuss them if you like.

1. It is often very difficult to see and stay within lane-markings on a dark rainy night....and if the cameras in modern vehicles cannot make out the lane-markings either, the lane-drift-warning and self-driving features cannot and will not work properly. One thing that would help is to use bright reflector-markings between the lanes that shine in the glow from headlights....this will make it much easier and safer to keep accurately within one's lane. There are some limitations to this, of course, one of them being that it would be impractical in construction areas where temporary lanes are constantly shifting to allow road work. But it would probably work 99% of the time, in 99% of places.

2. One reason there is so much running of yellow and red lights is that when the light is green and you are rapidly approaching it, you don't know at what moment it is going to turn yellow, and if there will be enough reasonable distance in front of you to stop without placing a lot of unnecessary wear on your brakes, or if you will be able to speed up and get through the yellow light before it turns red. I've long-wished that some kind of mechanism would be imbedded into green lights to let you know how much longer the green will last before turning yellow. There are several possible suggestions, but I personally like the idea of having the light start to flash green, on and off, starting about maybe ten seconds of so before it turns yellow. That will give you more time to decide if it would be better to slow down and stop, or go ahead and go through a possible yellow light...and possibly save some wear on the brakes and drivetrain.

3. Highway Departments spend a lot of time and money repaving roads with a nice new surface, only to see utility companies come along a short time later and start chopping up those roads to get to underground lines, pipes, etc...and then do makeshift repairs to the holes and ditches they leave behind, leaving jarring ridges and an uneven road surfaces which can jar your suspensions and wheels/tires. While no one, including me, thinks that utility companies should not do the work they do (we obviously depend on those electric/water/gas lines for our homes every day), IMO, these companies and contractors that do this work should be held to a MUCH higher standard of pavement repair than is currently the case. Often, they just carelessly dump a load of asphalt into the hole or ditch, let it dry, and don't even bother to roll it down smoothly or completely fill up the ditch. This, IMO, is unacceptable, and utility companies that have a record of doing this should be fined, or at least made to re-imburse the cost of the highway department coming back to do the repair correctly.

4. Pedestrians need better education if they are going to be out on the roads walking at night. Even with state-of-the-art Bi-Xenon headlights on his Kia Sportage SX, my own brother has narrowly avoided hitting several people lately that were mindlessly walking or riding bikes too close to traffic, on a dark night, in dark clothing, with no light colors or reflectors to illuminate them and make them more visible to drivers. The recent steadily-mounting numbers of pedestrian-deaths here in the D.C. area attest to this, and to other problems. Cadillac, not long ago, had a reasonably good solution to this with military-style night-vision infrared-sensors in its vehicles that picked up people and animals ahead that could not be easily picked up by the headlights....but those features either were dropped, or did not see to spread much beyond Cadillac and maybe a couple of other luxury makes. And, even with those features, pedestrians still should wear light-colored clothes or reflectors for visibility.

5. I see no reason why, at intersections that have little or no side traffic, or during light-traffic periods such as between 11 PM and 5 AM, there are needless full-green/yellow/red light cycles. Traffic is forced to stop essentially for nothing, wearing out brakes and using more gas to start the vehicle rolling again...and more shifts for the transmission, especially if one has to start on an uphill grade. Why not simply change the light cycle late at night and early in the morning to a flashing yellow/red on all sides, so all that drivers have to do is slow down a little, look, and if there is no other side-traffic, simply continue through the intersection. It would save fuel, time, and wear on vehicles.

 

And in daytime too.
Down here in Florida it doesn't matter if you are in the hood or a nice neighborhood, if you are near a busy intersection we have homeless people that are sometimes drunk or "out of it".

They ride their bicycles or walk down the sidewalk and cross roads at intersections without looking- completely spaced out like they're on another planet.
City plants lots of trees so you can't see them as they zip across the road as you make a right hand turn off the main road- we always have to watch for them, on alert like a hawk.

 

That's likely due to alcohol or drugs (and perhaps mental illnesses). I also suspect that a number of homeless people like Florida because of the mild winters.



Actually, you bring up a good point ....and maybe something I should have mentioned in my OP and didn't. Trees and bushes that block visibility at intersections should be trimmed back or cut down. And if those trees and bushes are sitting on private property, the property-owner should agree to have them trimmed or removed...at state expense. If the owner refuses, then a court could order them removed....perhaps under a form of Eminent Domain, where the needs of the state take precedence over private property.

 

Trim back bushes and somehow make it extremely clear to people to be in the correct place in traffic......

 

I'm all for this and while they are at it they can make a LOUD chirp or beep when the light turns green too.

We have a big problem with people playing with their phones while in the turning lane and if I don't honk after a couple seconds to wake them up, I end up sitting at a red light AGAIN.
As soon as they hear me honk they step on the gas as the light is yellow and turning red again and leave me sitting for another light change.

No more MR Nice Guy, I give them a courtesy count of 2 now... ONE... TWO... HONKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK.
That works good but I shouldn't have to do that. lol

 

I'm glad you limit it to your horn. Some people revert to their middle fingers.

 

Most roads already have these, the lane marking paint also has a reflective surface and it's texture helps to reflect light. Another cool trick? On the back side if you are driving the wrong way, they reflect back red.

I have noticed that when roads are repaved they rely more on the reflective paint vs using imbedded reflectors.

My trick for this is to look at the count down for the crosswalk, it counts down to the green light turning yellow.

This is a question of money, Asphalt companies would love to do a better job, but the municipality isn't willing to pay to properly patch the road surface.

Pedestrians need to take more responsibility for themselves in general...

Most intersections already do this.

 

Oh man this!!!

I just got back from watching the Rose Bowl and my local sports bar has bushes/shrubs on each side that make it so difficult to pull out. Why!? Why do commercial developers insist on these bushes and raised curbs?

 

Fanciness I would think...it's just annoying since you need to be able to see.

 

#2 in my city, they added countdown to all light intersections for the pedestrian signal, and it was such a big help for drivers.

 

dont drive 60-65 in the left lane

 

Word! I don't know how to fix that but it needs to be fixed