  As cities struggle to adapt to more ``people-centered'' urbanism,
transportation planning and engineering must innovate to expand the street
network strategically in order to ensure efficiency but also to deter sprawl.
Here, we conducted a study of over 200 cities around the world to understand
the impact that the patterns of deceleration points in streets due to traffic
signs has in trajectories done from motorized vehicles. We demonstrate that
there is a ubiquitous nonlinear relationship between time and distance in the
optimal trajectories within each city. More precisely, given a specific period
of time $\tau$, without any traffic, one can move on average up to the distance
$\left \langle D \right \rangle \sim\tau^\beta$. We found a super-linear
relationship for almost all cities in which $\beta>1.0$. This points to an
efficiency of scale when traveling large distances, meaning the average speed
will be higher for longer trips when compared to shorter trips. We demonstrate
that this efficiency is a consequence of the spatial distribution of large
segments of streets without deceleration points, favoring access to routes in
which a vehicle can cross large distances without stops. These findings show
that cities must consider how their street morphology can affect travel speed.
