I'm seeing here a lot of conflation between "street" and "road." In historical usage, a road is the surface you drive on, and a street is a pathway with buildin

I'm seeing here a lot of conflation between "street" and "road." In historical usage, a road is the surface you drive on, and a street is a pathway with buildings on either side. In people-centric culture, a street is a place for people. This is the way streets worked for millenia. Horses and horse-drawn carriages were usually allowed on the street as well, which are more dangerous than a person. In car-centric culture, a street is simply a kind of road, and all roads are the primary domain of cars. There is no logical reason that this must be so - cars could, for instance, only have right-of-way on non-street roads, like highways. Also, your assertion that cars (even old cars) cannot travel at a low enough speed to have a safe stopping distance around pedestrians is simply not true. Even a collision between a pedestrian and a car at "walking speed" (if the car completely failed to notice the pedestrian) rarely results in a fatality. Which you can easily look up yourself, but the numbers I'm seeing are less than 1% fatality rate for collisions below 10mph.