> A mode of accident that sometimes occurs is a car rolls down a hill then causes a fatality. We'll have to redesign cities to remove any elevation changes, and we should seriously consider just banning driving at night, as that's when the overwhelming majority of pedestrian fatalities occur.
That's a rather odd edge case, and seems to be much more prevalent in the USA than in other developed countries, and probably exactly because everyone depends on a car that you end up having old shitboxes barely functioning because someone is 100% dependent on that shitbox to live their lives. A car rolling down a hill is probably less than 1% of all car-related accidents in your country.
> Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road?
Why do cars need to have fast lanes inside a city? Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets, design streets sharing different transport modals so cars slow down. It works everywhere else, why is the USA so special that it won't work in American cities?
No one is talking about removing cars altogether, the discussion centers around making streets in cities safer for everyone, no driver wants to kill people, no one on a bike or on foot wants to be killed.
There's absolutely no need for cars to go over 30-40km/h in city streets, any need for higher speeds demand infrastructure separating transport modals.
Please, spend some time in a nice walkable city (some time = weeks to months). The difference is absurd. I'm originally from São Paulo, a city that follows the exact playbook from American cities, it's fucking hell with traffic, moving to Europe and experiencing how nice cities can be made me a hard advocate for changing, I like cars but they shouldn't have priority over everyone else inside a city...