Actually to have safer cities remove cars from the traffic equation. A city without cars will be safer and cleaner for pedestrians and bikes. Air quality will also be better.
You know what's crazier the more I think about it, that the article doesn't even mention? With turn-on-red, and an abundance of intersections without dedicated left-turn signals, pedestrian crossings in America are rarely protected. Turners-on-red rarely come to a stop, and are usually looking to the left, meaning they don't notice a crossing pedestrian until the last minute. Same for left-turners, who are paying more attention to the opposite lane. When left-turners misjudge the speed of oncoming traffic, you can bet they'll sooner accelerate into a pedestrian in the crosswalk than allow the oncoming car to hit them.
I ran into this problem (or rather, this problem nearly ran into me) quite often in Atlanta, where many impatient drivers use neighborhood streets to leapfrog standstill highway traffic. On the bright side, the city is experimenting with scramble crossings, which feel quite a bit safer to me.
Only saving grace is bike roundabouts really are nice. And if we had bike lines grade separated from pedestrians everywhere[1], it could be quite fast even to the point where roundabouts are necessary because the alternative of constantly burning energy on deceleration is so annoying.
[1]: A dangerous and macho-sounding idea I nonetheless will involuntary think about every red light.
So you park, hop on the metro, and head into the city without having to worry about the nightmare of parking or the stop-and-go traffic.
I never, ever drive into LA. I use the free parking at an outlying metro station and ride the train in (20 min). You can even leave your vehicle overnight so you can go out for drinks and crash at a friends place (even if you don't train runs until 2am). It's a night-and-day improvement on having to sit in traffic on the freeway, spend 40 minutes finding street parking, worry if someone is going to steal your catalytic converter, etc.
An added benefit is that I go into the city much more often than I otherwise would because I know that the whole process is pretty stress-free.
The question we should be asking is more like "why did we tear them all up"? Lots of US metro areas did have this until demographics changed in the mid-20th-century and anti-growth/anti-housing/anti-mobility mindsets took over.
You see it in eastern cities, like the Cincinatti Subway that was canceled forever in 1928: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Subway
Why their change in attitude? "[Cincinnati's] strategic location also provided a prime destination for migrants, who did not desire to go too far north and wanted to maintain some proximity to their southern home. Additionally, Cincinnati was not as large as some other northern cities, and thus it offered cheaper housing prices for migrants. By 1930, 34264 of Cincinnati’s African American residents were Southern-born, constituting 71.4% of the city’s Black population." https://jackdelisiohist415.wordpress.com/the-great-migration...
The Bay Area is a similar story and had several electric(!!) interurban rail systems:
- Until 1934: the Valley connected to San Jose and to the Southern Pacific main line at Mayfield (Palo Alto): https://rodsinks.com/images/1915map.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peninsular_Railway_(California...
- Until 1941: most of Marin County connected to San Francisco via ferry from Sausalito: https://i.imgur.com/GR4Trvv.jpg https://www.mendorailhistory.org/1_railroads/nwp/interurban....
- Until 1948: Contra Costa cities connected to San Francisco via ferry and eventually the Bay Bridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_System https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Key_System_and_March...
- Until 1941: San Francisco connected to Oakland, Berkeley, Walnut Creek, Pittsburgh etc, then rail ferry over Suisun Bay, then on to Sacramento, Woodland, Yuba City, Oroville, and as far north as Chico! https://www.american-rails.com/images/4320087869038472230602... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento_Northern_Railway
Meanwhile back in 2021 are just now electrifying the Caltrain corridor, and the same areas that shut down their original electric rail systems also successfully fought off BART in the '60s:
- This was the planned first phase of BART: https://i.imgur.com/hVT6fya.jpg
- And this was the way it was imagined to expand: https://i.imgur.com/TQ3PNL0.jpg
What changed around 1940 and made Bay Area voters hate transit and housing? Same old, same old :( https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/blacks_ch...