There certainly are cases like this. There's one little town I drive through sometimes which for a long time dropped the speed limit directly from 55MPH to 35MPH coming into town, and where the 35MPH limit sign was hidden behind a tree until you were about 3ft away from it. In what I am sure is a complete coincidence, this town has a $200 fine for speeding above the state penalty. Thankfully I never got hit with it, and they finally trimmed the tree after many years.

But most places display it prominently, and people just don't care. For every case like yours, there are a hundred places with obvious signs like "No turn on red" where people still turn on red.

I've obeyed dozens of "No turn on red" signs in my life, but I rarely see "No thru traffic" signs and until this thread, didn't really understand what the point of them was. I'm surely not hyper-vigilant about spotting and obeying them.

You could blame me for this, or we could ponder the implications of the different probabilities of various sign types being obeyed, and whether high rates of disobedience might indicate fairness issues that should be carefully managed.

You don't need to understand the point, you just need to comprehend and obey.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that a law which is frequently broken may be a bad law, but "reading and obeying traffic signs" is not a particularly high bar to clear. If such signs get ignored, it's because the average driver is horrendous at driving. The only solutions to that are vastly better driver training and testing than we have now, or autonomous cars.

I'm not sure there is a high rate of disobedience here, though. The article seems to be talking about places where such laws don't exist, although the residents may try to change that.