Just to be clear, I do think the obvious solution to terrible things like this is vastly expanded public transit so that people don’t have to rely on cars to get everywhere, not overhyped technology and driving aids that are still only marginally better than a human driver. I just thought the article was interesting.
I currently live in a place where there aren’t sidewalks for more than 80% of the roads (heck I’ve lives in a place that had two roads with sidewalks and only 4 with pavement) treating roads as inherently unsafe is fair only in the context of stupidly large cities. There are still a bunch of cities that have dirt (not gravel) roads and they suit the needs because if there aren’t hundreds of people needing to use a road it doesn’t need to be able to handle dozens of cars.