I currently live in a place where there aren’t sidewalks for more than 80% of the roads (heck I’ve lives in a place that had two roads with sidewalks and only 4 with pavement) treating roads as inherently unsafe is fair only in the context of stupidly large cities. There are still a bunch of cities that have dirt (not gravel) roads and they suit the needs because if there aren’t hundreds of people needing to use a road it doesn’t need to be able to handle dozens of cars.