Traffic engineers increased the danger to pedestrians by sometimes omitting one of the crosswalks at an intersection. In other words, traffic engineers increased the danger to the travelling public, for the purpose of discouraging the competition to automobiles. The human cost is unconscionable. It cannot be denied that increasing the number of automobile trips by destroying transit greatly increased the accident rate - both to people who switched to driving automobiles, and to pedestrians and bicyclists who must now encounter more automobiles. Further health costs are caused by air pollution, but clean air has not been one of the goals of traffic engineering departments.
Safety is given consideration, but only within the context of other goals being satisfied.
If safety was the main traffic engineers' goal, then they would not have supported destroying the safest form of transportation - trains.