Agreed that everyone wants to do the right thing, I see car drivers doing it everyday on the streets of San Francisco. I also see idiots texting and speeding. But I digress.

Even the ones who are trying to drive cautiously fundamentally accelerate much faster and move faster and have 3000 lbs on me.

We need highly separated infrastructure in cities or an extremely low speed limit (15mph) in cities on non car only roads.

No amount of good will and mutual responsibility is going to solve this problem.

Yeah, architecture can influence choices people make. It is something at the heart of Christopher Alexander’s work on architecture, although he generalizes this to human interactions.

When we look at that, we look at the whole. Safety is only one concern out of many. Fostering a sense of personal responsibility is another. There are others: artistic beauty and grace; personal initiative and prevailing over challenges; kindness and universal kinship towards all of mankind. Just to name a few.

An excessive focus on safety will prevent people from developing that sense of personal responsibility.

So this isn’t something to “solve” like that. We have not even figured out just what it is we want to do as a society. We have not even been able to recognize as a society that people have a diversity of views, and that individuals are at different stages of maturity and growth.

Even so: I generally agree that dedicated infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists, and public transportation is way better than this excessive focus on cars and SUVs. Investing into is costly, but we have to look at it as investing towards our children and grandchildren’s futures.