I don't feel, strictly speaking, unsafe. Just annoyed at a personal level - obviously this happens enough (in fact, it happened again between my last post and t

I don't feel, strictly speaking, unsafe. Just annoyed at a personal level - obviously this happens enough (in fact, it happened again between my last post and this one!) that I'm very alert for it. However, I'm a large adult crossing in a very high visibility zone and am alert. As for the 'kids are capable' thing - yes. We had our youngest going places independently at an age where our older child (~3 years apart) had peers whose parents were still driving them around. But the argument from LDCs is pretty terrible, as they have orders of magnitude more traffic deaths. LDCs also typically have a culture of 'negotiation' of crossing roads where you kinda just have to get up on your hind legs and cross (anarchy makes drivers far more alert) while we have a culture of strict rules ("if you cross at the wrong place you are doing the wrong thing and it's your own fault that the driver just ran into you"). The 'rules culture' tends to make drivers feel that they can just zoom wherever they feel like and shut off mental collision avoidance algorithms with anything that isn't another car. This phenomenon is behind the whole 'naked streets' thing (not that I'm a fan, but the diagnosis is pretty good).