“We’ve tried to handle speeding traffic through educational tools and enforcement, and not through building physical mitigation,”
Maybe it's just my area, but since the new year I haven't seen a single patrol car watching for speeding in my or nearby neighborhoods. If there was an enforcement portion, at least empirically it seemed a pretty sparse effort.

And in reality that may not be a bad thing! Law enforcement personnel are expensive! Being realistic about your budget and available resources is important, and saying 'we're going to go back to paying for physical street changes instead of paying more to have a person physically patrolling the area' can be a perfectly reasonable option. They just need to follow through with that, because people here speed an awful lot.