The problem that makes vehicles incompatible with other modes of transportation (mostly cycling, but increasingly walking) is that cars are increasingly made "safer" at a social cost -- namely, visibility of pedestrians/cyclists and vehicle mass (and therefore momentum). Cars are much heavier today than before, and they have worse visibility of the road than before. This is to make the driver safer, and it comes at the cost of the safety of non-car drivers around.

Cyclists and pedestrians have (almost) no voice when it comes to regulation of automotive safety. There isn't even a notion of "whole community safety" when automotive safety is discussed. The only thing that seems to matter is whether the driver is protected, and this has created a safety imbalance. In the rare moments that something is done, we focus mostly on driving speed.

I think we can do more.

We should be asking ourselves: Is there an engineering solution to ensure that foot traffic, bike traffic, and car traffic can peacefully coexist to move people around as effectively and harmlessly (environment, other people, etc) as possible?