traffic engineers: creativity knows no bounds

Don't get too excited, guys and gals, but if you're having trouble designing roads so that people will actually drive at the design speed, how about this:

Several experimental Japanese "melody roads" have been deployed, whose cut grooves and bumps play distinctive songs through your car, but only when you drive slowly and carefully down them. This seems like a potentially useful bit of social engineering -- set the musical timing on a road at the safe speed, and combine that with timed traffic lights that reward you with a "green wave" if you stick to the limit, and you'd have a pretty good set of cues telling you how to travel at speed.

And I love the tag line from one of the comments following this BoingBoing post:

Next up: "Symphony for Road Rage in A(ccident) Minor"