Car drivers regularly kill bicyclists with little to no response from the law. The opposite isn't a thing.
Bikers should realize they are driving a more dangerous vehicle. Bikes have no protective covering, no crash cage. Your body is exposed directly to the road...
If you want a safer bike, build a human powered car.
And yes I bike or walk most of my life so don't tell me I'm some evil driver. I'm just realistic and not vindictive.
We could stop building suburbs, stop building massive parking lots around big box stores, add more public transportation such as light rails, make some highway lanes dedicated to bus transportation (thereby reducing induced demand for cars which would actually reduce traffic), etc.
This is just more of the division that we do to make ourselves feel morally superior. It's the "I don't shop at Walmart like the poor's" mentality that seeks to elevate the status of the critic while ignoring the very real issues that make people want to shop at a giant big box Walmart store rather than their local downtown.
Cars are a requirement for living in modern cities if you're poor (with more money you can afford to live closer to work and public transportation). That fact alone is extremely hostile to poor people because it add 100s of dollars to their monthly bills in car payments, maintenance, and insurance.
You don't think people get any value out of a single store, with every product you may want, and much lower prices? This runs contrary to every piece of anecdotal and non-anecdotal evidence I've seen about the way consumers behave en masse. Hell, there's even an upper-income analogue in Amazon's explosive success over the last decade.
Like I said in an above comments we can sit around and think about what we should have done, or we can make suggestions based on what we have. One is more constructive than the other.
These are only a problem if you build your society such that bikes are traveling physically next to fast cars.
But that does not mean biking is unsafe—it just means our current setup forces all traffic into a single unprotected road next to fast cars.
I accept that you want to look back and lament what we didn't do. I find that depressing, so I'd rather think about what we can do right now based on the infrastructure we have to encourage people to adopt people centric modes of transit.
Having a safer bicycle would get us there. It would keep people closer to homes, encourage the creation of smaller business centers instead of massive strip malls, and revitalize downtown streets as more people decide to opt for the convenience and enjoyment of the human powered methods.
This isn't revanchist thinking. This is simply the advocacy strategy used in the Netherlands to pivot from a car heavy society to a bicycle heavy one. It's used as a model of advocacy for many pro-mode-share groups throughout the Western world.
https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...
So you think bikers should care more about making themselves save isntead of car owners about making everyone save?
I will contend that "pedestrian" is the base state of a human who may also be a "driver" when seated in a vehicle. Cities are designed for whom?
We err in allowing cars and pedestrians or cyclists to intersect at all. Cars belong in tunnels or highway-like contained danger zones where high-velocity armored vehicles are the only objects moving there.