Paint = safety is a horribly misguided heuristic. Playing traffic engineer is just as bad an idea as playing dentist or attorney. Just don’t.
Given the absolutely abysmal track record of traffic engineers in the U.S as far as pedestrian safety goes, I hardly think you could do any worse by trying to do their job for them.
Crosswalks are literally used as a signal to pedestrians that this is a recommended crossing point that probably meets standards (that make it very likely a driver would be entirely at fault if they hit you crossing there but also very possible for them to avoid hitting you if they are following the law).
note that pedestrians have right-of-way at every intersection unless explicitly marked otherwise, regardless of crosswalk markings, so drivers should be looking for pedestrians at every intersection.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/29/highway-code...
In the UK they still rely on road tubes to count traffic and I don't know if they've even considered networking traffic lights yet (maybe in London).
But before you encourage others to pursue this activity, you probably want to make clear, to them, notwithstanding any appearance of a lack of humility, the distinction between your knowledge and possible shortfalls in theirs.
That doesn't mean that individual people aren't smart enough to "play traffic engineer" because traffic engineering is so super complicated.
I see the moral idea and simplicity behind it, however not quite sure about law.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
(so what I'm trying to say - even though I'm a complete layman - is that from the "personal injury" aspect every painted crosswalk is a real one)
There are implicit assumptions in highway standards that people don't really understand. Engineers balance cost, safety, traffic flow, pedestrian flow etc. It is optimal within a particular set of assumptions about those things. The public should have more power to influence that balance at a local level.
I agree that this was misguided, but the impulse is good. Ideally we would have simple apps that could help people plan transport in their communities and understand the risks better. The problem of badly designed roads is too large to be solved by highway engineers alone. And the fact that we have so many terrible roads is not a good indorsement of the status quo.
And they generally don't wanna talk about it because lord knows a subset of the public throws a fit once you start trying to draw a line in the safety sand.
I have worked in air quality assessment and you see something similar. A single development usually has statistically negligible effect on air quality. No measurable impact on health. But that isn't really the whole story. Vehicle exhaust absolutely does effect health. It is understandable that people object to that on a specific case by case basis even when tacitly consenting at a societal level
But mostly I think safety is used as a proxy for other things. Adding a lane to a highway can have a safety justification even when the real purpose is something else. Everyone is lazy, and the degree we allow a sense of entitlement changes over time.
I suspect that many may be kept because it's a good plan to have a crosswalk there, but traffic engineers don't have enough time or budget to make all the changes to the road they'd like to.
There's a lot of "copy paste engineering" that anyone with a little care can do with an acceptable success rate but we prevent them from doing "because liability". So then we go engage the services of an engineering firm which does the copy paste, makes the client sign some boilerplate that disclaims most of the liability anyway and charges a lot of money for the privilege.