Our cities are so messed up that just leaving the house is stressful and time consuming. I can't walk down the street without seeing at least one car do something monstrously stupid. I've witnessed accidents, screaming, near misses, people driving on sidewalks, blowing through stop signs without looking, and endless drunk/high drivers weaving around.
I can totally understand why people are holed up in their houses. It feels like a war zone out there.
People who actually live in cities aren't afraid of cities. People who live in the Midwest are told by cable news that cities are war zones because they like hearing it for culture war points, and then the sentiment gets further spread in comments sections. But they're not driving down restaurant business. I'm not an exceptionally brave person, but I feel much safer in cities than cable news wants me to feel.
That still sounds much more dramatic than any reality that I've seen. I'd believe that an instance of a car hitting a pedestrian is on average more serious now than in the past, because people are buying such stupidly big cars. But your scenario sounds like dystopian sci-fi.
Much of the internet is highly neurotic people thinking their twisted conceptions of reality are shared by others. I'm not a fan of the bad traffic enforcement in SF, but our family walks everyday, we take bikes to the majority of our things, and only take the car rarely when we need to transport a stroller some distance (our child is not old enough for the bicycle).
Everything is all right but it can be much better. It was even better in the recent past so one could argue it's not at it's best but it's not a warzone.
Traffic violence has become so normalized that you don't even see it anymore. Twice as many people are killed by traffic accidents than are murdered per capita. Your ad hominem attacks do not invalidate the piles of evidence.
Gratuitious is: Unnecessary or unwarranted; unjustified.
If you think that is is unwarranted to describe crashing 2+ ton vehicles into human beings at speed as violence, I would wonder how you would describe it.
I can totally understand why people are holed up in their houses. It feels like a war zone out there.