When I was young my dad took me out to the curb and warned me about the dangers of being on the street. He pointed out how fast cars were going, how being hit could be really damaging, how animals not infrequently died from being hit. He also warned about getting excited while playing games and inadvertently running into the street. Even bicycles were a danger. Everything changes at the curb. Having a good imagination, I took the lesson to heart.

The onus here is on municipal and federal governments to make roads and cars safer.

Governments should make roads safer but until they do, we should care for ourselves.

Imagine a sidewalk where the ground is crooked, full of holes and parts of the pavement sticking up. Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall?

The same logic applies to most dangerous things. Should the government make sure the food and supplements that are imported is safe? Of course. Does that mean you should order food and supplements from any shady site from a random 3rd world country with no reviews? Absolutely not.

The answer isn't binary. It's both. Governments are us, and we use that tool to manage collective resources like roads and sidewalks.

Obviously we do what we can in the moment. That doesn't mean those given power are free to neglect our collective property, or even sell out to the interests of those who would profit from pedestrian hostile "solutions".

Definitely, that was my point, too. We should strive for change but accept when change hasn't happened yet.

Meanwhile in Shanghai, it tends to be a little too difficult to cross an entire street at once, so the way you cross is lane by lane, as if you were playing Frogger. (Except that you'll rest on lane dividers as opposed to right in the middle of a lane.)

Pedestrians getting run over while doing this is not a noticeable problem.

https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/how-dangerous-are-china...

We should try to bring that number (4000 or 40) down but if it's happens to be a very unlikely cause of death, maybe we should focus on more pressing things. Not ignore the 4000 (out of 1.4 billion), of course, just put it in perspective. I'm sure much more people in China die from other easily-preventable deaths. Road-related deaths are much more graphic and frightening than deaths from things like the quality of our food and water, contaminants in paints and construction materials, air pollution, infections, diabetes, cancer and so on. Most such deaths are not graphic, you won't see them on kaotic, but are usually far longer, painful and disturbing for the person and family.

To offer a personal rebuttal to you saying I don't care about those people as there are many that look like them, I love the saying "if you help a stray animal, you won't make a dent in the whole situation of helpless stray animals but you'll have changed that animal's life completely". So yes, 1 person or animal matters a lot. I've moved snails from the sidewalk back into the grass so they don't get stepped on. Likely billions of snails are getting crushed every year and what I do is not sustainable, but I still do it.

How much of our "safety" culture around kids is because people don't have basic life skills and aren't passing them on to kids?

Making eye contact and waiting for a vehicle to actually respond to the conditions at hand will eliminate the vast majority of "assumed" mistakes. Trying to be 100% aware of traffic and understanding that folks can be even bigger aggressive idiots is also part of it, but not perfect.

You just have to accept that in some rare instances the swiss cheese holes will line up regardless of what you do. And be at peace with it.

I suppose since this seems to logical and "not a big deal" to me means that I am extreme outlier on the subject.

Ranging from the understandable, but unacceptable (Say, CBDR/Constant bearing, decreasing range, which makes a lot of drivers misidentify an object as stationary even as it is moving towards them on a collision course) to the flat out unbelievable - I've been almost run over in a lit pedestrian crossing. While wearing hi-vis clothing. Pushing a baby stroller, also hi-vis. AFTER having made eye contact with the driver and even gotten a nod from her. After the car slowed down. Sigh.

In the latter case, it turned out she had assumed that us making eye contact meant that I had seen the car and would wait until it had safely passed the crossing. At least that was what she claimed when I asked why, oh why she'd approached the crossing, slowed down, made eye contact with the pedestrian - and yet proceeded to drive through...

Oh, and don't even get me started on the proliferation of touch screens forcing the driver to take his or her attention off the road to interact with the car. This was a solved problem, using physical buttons you soon learned the exact location of so you could reach for them while still keeping your attention on what was in front of you.

Yeah, that's called living! I definitely got myself into one or two dangerous situations growing up. I couldn't imagine a childhood where everything is safety railings and padded walls.

My kids still roam, albeit with check-ins, and a lot of training about streets, driveways, and people.

I don't fault parents who reach for trackers or are uncomfortable with letting young kids out of sight. Even back in the day a lot of horrible things happened that weren't reported widely. A family member of mine was nearly abducted off their bike as a teen, if not for a nearby neighbor opening the door when she knocked looking for help.

Looking at the statistics here in my native Norway, children killed in traffic is down a couple of orders of magnitude since the sixties - while traffic, at the same time, has increased by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Same goes for drowning - drastically reduced rates compared to the sixties.

Of course, I guess one can argue that maybe it has become too safe - in the sense that kids aren't exposed to enough risk to learn how to evaluate it, leading to major crashes with reality later on.

Then again, as a parent, I kind of like the idea that there's never been a safer time to be a child.

That doesn't stop me from urging them to ditch the screen time in favour of heading out into the boonies to find something to do, though.

If you want something with a gut punch related to car safety, check out British vehicle PSA advertisements. Holy moly are those grim! They’re memorable, focused, and unflinching.

Personally, I’d go with some mini-documentaries or after-the-fact breakdowns put out by local American TV stations. They take it slow, film on location, and try to have a takeaway lesson.

I was exposed to violence first from movies (my parents let me watch anything and I thank them for that), then from shock sites, 4chan, liveleak, /r/watchpeopledie and so on.

I think I've really internalized how dangerous the road is, how dangerous machines are, how horrible war really is, how you can get killed by just saying the wrong thing, how there's always a chance you can die from anything at any moment. I still sometimes cross on reds and mouth off at someone who might be dangerous - I'm not scared of anything to an unnecessary degree, although being "scared" in a rational way is good IMO. I think I have a better way to assess risk than the average person, though.

I found some of the PSAs and they involve mild injuries or death without the injury itself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeUX6LABCEA

I bet if you show kids actual footage of road accidents, it will burn into their memory for a few days, long enough for them to think it over a few times. The PSAs are really forgettable here.

I really like this PSA about safety conditions as it made me recall it for a few days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOk2Akqb3CI

Now I'm actually really careful about any type of spills or grease in my kitchen even though I rarely move around big pots of boiling water.