As it stands, Chicago has police cars all over the place (in every neighborhood I’ve lived in anyway) often just sitting there parked and by my estimation there’s close to zero traffic enforcement, so we certainly seem to have a lot of capacity for maintaining this sort of enforcement and I suspect it would be like introducing a few wolves into a national park—it doesn’t take much enforcement to drive significant, broad changes.
> A systemic problem like this is a result of poor road design, not individual deviant drivers.
In many cases, I agree that there is a systemic problem at play, but these cases tend to be highways (i.e., no pedestrians) and the issue is politicians setting speed limits which traffic engineers understand to be unsafely low for the road’s design (the safest speed being that which 85% of drivers would naturally drive if unencumbered). And it hardly matters how engineers design the road because politicians will always respond to a vocal minority who argue that the limits should be lower.
However with respect to streets (i.e., places where pedestrians belong) rather than highways, the issue is only systemic with respect to enforcement—many other parts of the country (or even the same places with different enforcement) have similar streets but drivers are better behaved. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t room for improvement everywhere, but only that the issue isn’t “Chicago has stupid street engineers”.