London Buses are Good

That's the kind of attitude which encourages pedestrians (and too many cyclists) to neglect their own responsibility. I suppose it makes a change from the attitude which informs most classical traffic engineering, an attitude which seeks to eliminate personal responsibility by separating vulnerable users into their own cotton wool lined ghettoes, but it misses the point by just as much.

Oddly enough, it's exactly the other way around. It's been precisely by de-emphasising the responsibilities of car drivers and excessively emphasising people's responsibilities when on foot or on a bike that the current 'Road Safety' climate has come about. Traditional traffic engineering has done the opposite to 'separating vulnerable users into their own cotton wool-lined ghettos'--it's actually de-emphasised their priority at every turn and made them feel unwelcome on the streets and roads.

I agree with you that in an ideal world all road users should recognise their responsibilities equally (i.e., there wouldn't be a need to emphasise car drivers' responsibility more strongly than that of pedestrians or cyclists, as there wouldn't be 3,000 road deaths caused by motorists every year--well, I am talking about an ideal world), but until we get there, we still have a lot of redressing the balance to do. It's currently a very skewed picture.