This might sound pedanatic but I hate when transportation choices are framed as for cars or for bikes. Transportation is for people. Talking about and designing our street infrastructure as if it’s designed for machines like cars and bikes leads us to designing systems that aren’t very friendly to humans (one needs to look no further than the ever increasing incidents of deaths for people walking or riding a bike).
I'm not sure what the point of your comment is to be honest. Transportation choices are made between different modes of transportation all the time. There's no universally good option.
Take NYC where light changes happen about every 45 seconds. This is necessary for pedestrians to be able to get anywhere and because the blocks are fairly narrow (in the north-south direction) in Manhattan.
I've visited the Bay Area many times and it's a nightmare as a pedestrian. You need to cross, say, Castro and El Camino Real and you might be waiting 3+ minutes for the light change to cross those 6 lanes of traffic (and you probably have to be on your guard for inattentive drivers turning right at red lights even when you have right-of-way.
I used to walk back to Mountain View from the Google campus along Shoreline in the afternoons. That's where the on ramp is onto 101 South and it uses a light-less system (I don't believe it's a full clover leaf?). Crossing that on ramp to continue down Shoreline was essentially an exercise in waiting for some driver to take pity on you to let you cross.
Clearly a choice has been made in favour of cars.
Urban planners also go out of their way to restrict traffic to 20mph in pedestrian-heavy areas by narrowing lanes and decreasing distances between lights because there's a huge increase in injuries and death to pedestrians by going 30mph.
So a choice is made in favour of pedestrians here.
Some of the other 101 crossings in the Bay Area (3rd Ave/101 in San Mateo, Hillsdale Blvd/101 in San Mateo at least) are lightless and are really dangerous for both cyclists and pedestrians.
The peninsula is a car-choked hellscape however on a population-weighted basis I guess it is a little better. Many more people live in the walkable places than in the others.
