Id argue the idea is that its easy to check for cars as you only need 1 lane of traffic. Traffic engineers don't really consider the needs and safety of pedestrians, they just do the bare minimum to accommodate them. And the engineers that do try to care about pedestrians are told things like "well thats not how its done in this book from the 50s" or "that would reduce our throughput by 5% meaning we'd need to invest in another car lane"