[wilted-iris]

Fewer people will walk when infrastructure prioritizes drivers and makes it uncomfortable and unsafe to walk. This isn’t the only option.

Cars being built for pedestrian safety is one piece of that picture. As you note, impact safety falls into this category and provides limited benefits for collisions at speed. There’s a lot more to that story though, as we can see in societies that value pedestrian lives. Automatic braking and avoidance, driver attention monitoring, and speed limiters are all options. Add in safe infrastructure, safety enforcement, etc.

There’s a broad range of tools available to reduce pedestrian deaths. None are perfect, none apply universally, but we should consider all of them.

[lupusreal]

For various reasons, Americans broadly opted to live in suburbs with car-centric lifestyles instead of dense urban areas where walking is viable. Where I live now I'm about 100x more likely to encounter a deer than a pedestrian. This is the context needed to understand why Americans generally aren't interested in prioritizing pedestrian safety. Making pedestrians safer so people can give up their cars is just a bizarre proposal to most Americans. The American anti-car niche is very small, comprising mostly of terminally online people with anxiety problems.

For what it's worth, I did personally live in a city and had a pedestrian lifestyle for about 15 years. I never felt particularly imperiled; the national statistic for pedestrian deaths may seem spooky but some very basic precautions, like making a habit of looking both ways even when you have the right of way, eliminates almost all of the risk.