Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you've misunderstood the law you've quoted. It's not about "crossing without checking", it's about the pedestrian "yield[ing] the right of way to all vehicles". It's hard to imagine from a modern perspective, but until laws like this were passed roads were not, as today, universally perceived as places for cars to drive. In cities in much of the developing world the pre-jaywalking regime remains: road users w…
> where one car trying to go from point A to point C is effectively given total preference over all the people trying to live their lives (and cross the street) in B. That's a very simplistic view - it was never questionable and no one was "given preference". It was simply a practical decision in order to allow cars to use the road. The car took a few seconds to stop from even a pedestrians walking speed. The pedestr…
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.