>> It sounds to me like far too many critical safety decisions are being made with an eye on money rather than safety.
Major Airports are often locked in to the Physical foot print either due to Geography or other factors. Sure you can just "move the airpoirt" but then you have the NIMBY problem where everyone wants an airport close by, but never near by....
And if you want to simplistically run it all down to "money" well at that point everything is a money problem, so for like NYC; they could spend billions or Trillions to turn midtown into a big airport, but that seem rather unrealistic.
This narrative that came out of COVID of "if it saves just one life" is a bit ridiculous imo, and not at all practical
You're ignoring the core truth of the comment you're replying to: Scarcity exists. There is no way to have it all; there are only compromises. Simply walking is dangerous because you could fall. We could all go back to being infants* crawling on the floor if we wanted to be safer. But we won't. Making more compromises in the name of safety has to be justified. Planes will never be perfectly safe. That is okay.
I don't know the analysis for the multiple clearance on runways on the US (honestly, it's the first time I hear about it). What I know is that the US has many complex risk analysis that my country (3rd largest aviation area on the world, after the US and EU) doesn't have enough data to replicate. That leads to plenty of policies that we can't actually understand the reasoning.