Many of the people who insist that there is no safety impact from high speed local roads nevertheless choose to raise their kids in suburban cul-de-sacs with minimal traffic and curvy roads with low speed limits. They want the right to subject other communities to speeding cars for their own convenience while protecting their own families from them.

Cars are getting less safe for pedestrians and cyclists, not more safe. Why should pedestrians bear the human cost of higher car speeds when drivers are the ones benefitting from it? Easy to pretend the benefits of speeding outweigh the costs when the benefits accrue to you and the costs accrue to other people.

You're running around this thread smugly declaring yourself too smart to fall for the government's lies while failing to spend a few seconds doing the trivial arithmetic that would disprove all of your deeply held beliefs. Which of your other political or economic beliefs will fall apart with a little bit of middle school math?

It’s not even true in general that the trend has been switching towards lower quality products. Despite all the ahistoric whining about how much better the old days were, Americans have gotten richer over the past several decades and have been buying bigger cars, dining out instead of eating at home, spending more on travel etc.