They tried: https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/murder-machines/
It was opposed by a concerted effort from car companies and other advocates to depict car skeptics as out of touch and paranoid, and to simultaneously lobby for a bunch of new laws around right of way, jaywalking, and so on. It may well be that if YouTube and cable news had existed then, the concerned advocates would have carried the day and North America might have built a robust, high speed rail network instead of the interstates, with every major metro area having the comprehensive regional rail needed to bring commuters in from suburbs without private vehicles.
We can't know exactly what that alternate present would have looked, but there are many for whom it might have been much better (though definitely not car companies or airlines, of course).
Ironically this is happening now with Tesla autopilot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Incidents
I wonder if these kinds of lists will appear in relation to covid.
So far the 5-year survival rate for people under 65 is 0%.
If we try to just go back to normal, though, a lot of people are going to get sick and die.
The solution has to be policies which seek to protect people from the virus with minimal collateral damage. This is no different from other spheres of public policy - for example we have speed limits on the road, and we have road deaths. We could lower all speed limits to 5mph and prevent all deaths, but the roads would become practically useless and society would grind to a halt. So we've selected limits that we feel are a reasonable compromise between safety and practicality.
The vast majority of COVID-19 fatalities are people who are over 65 and/or have the mentioned chronic conditions. So it makes sense to do everything we can to protect these people.
As an aside, since cars are pretty dangerous, I think we're very lucky that social media and the 24/7 news cycle didn't exist when they were invented. What with the panic these mediums generate, you have to wonder if cars would have gotten off the ground and become commonplace or if they would have just been panic banned.