Some of the speed bumps-like techniques here in Sweden will do more than just be a bump, it will severely damage the tires if you don't slow down. Curbs that require the driver to make very tight turns for example can be made from fairly sharp stone with an clear edge. A SUV/pickup truck can speed over it, but the trip to the repair shop will make it less fun.

They added some square-like flower pots in the middle of a lovely road next to where I live in order to force drivers to make a double S turn. Those are made from sharp rust-painted steel, and most of the corners are now painted with other peoples car paint. The only way to make it through is to drive at walking speed, which basically everyone do.

We should return to the original double-humped design from Compton:

https://libanswers.wustl.edu/faq/76174?ref=contraption.co

the SUV/pickup culture is bad enough here in the South but they place speedbumps aggressively all over the place here.

Like 4" tall ones with no curve so that it absolutely slams the shit out of your small car if you're doing anything over 3mph. And they place them like every 8 feet. If you're in the lifted trucks most people drive here you can't even tell.

How have average car sizes and weight changed in this period of time?

The numbers seem a bit alarmist on the fatality front, seems like it would make more sense to account for fatalities as a proportion of accidents overall. In absolute numbers, we're talking tens of deaths and thousands of accidents.

As a visitor (periodically throughout the whole timespan) it's seemed to me like there's massive growth in population in the metro area and more densification inside the Seattle downtown area. Tough to tell what geography this exactly captures. Assuming the numbers are valid, I do wonder if there's a significant demographic or exurb shift, where older drivers became a higher proportion of all drivers where they already lived, and a bunch of others either stopped entirely or moved outside the city boundaries.

If memory serves, I feel like there's also a tendency to accidentally end up committed to a toll bridge crossing by getting stuck on an exit/on ramp off one of the highways, which might make people panic and bail at the last second erratically, but that idea seems a bit farfetched

I live in Seattle and anecdotally I have seen the number of people running red lights absolutely explode in the last two years. Literally from seeing once or twice pre-COVID to at least one a day. This is not an exaggeration, there's a particular light on my commute that I see at least one driver run per day. My theory is that in an effort to make the intersection safer they adjusted the lights so now there's a period where cars all have a red light while pedestrians are crossing. Meanwhile a certain segment of the population sees all cars in the intersection stopped and decides to slam it. It's a recipe for disaster given there's a middle school down the road from that light...

this reference does talk about those stats, but doesn't link in any way to adverse affects of attempting to bring down deaths.

We're not talking about 2003 or something. The Zero Vision-related programs started getting serious around 2016. Deep into the iPhone era.

And there are also other facts that point out to Zero Vision being the case. Cities that did not go all-in on this program seem not to have experienced the rise in deaths. I have not researched this in detail, because quantifying the level of road sabotage is tricky. But it definitely _looks_ like it's the case just based on subjective observations.

the rise of drivers on their phones