Funny I'm in Tokyo right now, in a central popular party tourist area. I just saw an all girls school with kids around 5-6 years old walk home alone after school.

I spend half my time in Taipei and regularly see young children walking, taking the metro etc. In comparison I recently went camping with inlaws who had no shortage of complaints about the children riding bikes on their rural country road, doing wheelies and what not. To be fair to their point, the posted speed limit is 45MPH and traffic definitely travels well above that. But it's so sad how the US has no room for people not in vehicles.

In Taipei you can see this slowly affecting the city as well. Many new pedestrian "safety" measures inconvenience pedestrians to keep them safe from cars. I'd rather see the cars inconvenienced than the pedestrians, but I wonder if this is just a natural progression.

The one place these seem to not be effective are smaller streets. Small streets seem to keep the cars and pedestrians much more equal.