Taking out systematic issues that cause bad driving is proving the point. Just like how the spike in pedestrian deaths is caused by an individualistic arms race between drivers as to who can have the biggest, heaviest vehicle.
I don't think everyday driving is reckless. I just see a lot of drivers doing things they should not be doing - and this is not the fault of the civil engineers. These drivers are breaking the law by texting and driving, speeding, not using turn signals, and changing lanes when they shouldn't. I'm challenging the categorization that everyday driving is worse than reckless driving, as the article implies.
Our roadways are designed for safety and for various degrees of safety. You could say a particular stretch of road is not safe enough, but it would be wrong to say civil engineers are blasé about safety. There is no way to make a totally safe road because there is no way to engineer a totally safe anything.
They are designed for the safety of the cars that use them. There is often nothing safe about how they are designed with respect to pedestrians (who are frequently ignored completely).
There are many things we could do to minimize accidents in specific circumstances. In residential zones, narrower, tree-lined roads tend to reduce average speed. Continuous sidewalks change the dynamic from "pedestrian crossing road" to "car crossing sidewalk".
Just like a huge student debt load is the responsibility of one person, but a national student debt load of $1.7t is a systemic failure.
If one outcome is occurring across a large data set, it means the cause can be both systemic and individualistic.