I generally feel safe at crosswalks, but I never trust the infrastructure of the crosswalk to keep me safe. If you blindly trust the crosswalk light you'll probably wind up dead. I always look both ways while crossing the street, I keep my head on a swivel during the entire crossing not just the start. Ultimately I am responsible for my own safety, I won't get a second life just because the traffic light said I was in the right.

If you stay attentive when crossing, I think almost all crosswalks are safe. If you aren't attentive when crossing, none of them are safe.

> ”Painted bike lanes (and crosswalks, tbqh) are death traps and overall fucking terrible fig-leaf concepts. Barriers (and over/underpasses, etc) or nothing.”

Painted, unprotected lanes aren’t ideal, but they’re better than nothing if they encourage more people to cycle.

There’s plenty of examples where I live where painted cycle lanes have later been upgraded to proper protected cycle lanes (with kerbs, cycle-specific signals at intersections, etc) once they showed the demand was there.

I’d also argue that simply having more cyclists in an area makes cyclists safer because car drivers become more aware of them.

Sharing the road with a sane driver travelling at sane speed limits in a sane car is perfectly reasonable. There's no practical reason 95% of motor vehicles couldn't be as small as the eu L7e class (or even half the weight) and governed to 40km/h (with a manual override for larger roads) with the remaining 5% only travelling on local roads by timed permit. Filling the roads with monster trucks is an intentional policy choice, not some inevitability and even not what people would naturally decide to do.

For rural roads a bike lane works fine as there are very few conflict points.

> “Filling the roads with monster trucks is an intentional policy choice”

It really is. For decades, US fuel economy standards, emissions rules, and tax breaks and depreciation rules have all been weighted in favor of bigger, heavier vehicles.