Man I remember when they used to take away peoples licenses in the USA. Good times. It’s like the only way you can get people to recognize that it’s a privilege and not a divine right is by taking it away.

The taxi drivers are dicks, they lay on the horn the second the light turns green, good luck driving a stick in that hellscape.

There is no pedestrian crossing in NYC that is not either signed or signalled, so there is zero ambiguity about when you are supposed to stop. I'm guessing you are leaving out part of the story and very curious what the actual citation was. Regardless, your first sentence is blatant misinformation, please be careful about how you phrase things.

In Illinois pedestrians ALWAYS have the right of way. So not stopping for a crosswalk is a good way to see if there's a cop lurking nearby.

Which law does that break?

Carry a disability stick with a hard metal ball on the front. Hold it out in front of you and if they buzz you, their head lights get broken

My answer to this question is generally "Cement, the more the better."

That's a very outdated view of traffic engineering and psychology. People (and animals in general) don't stop doing things in response to punishment unless they have a very high chance of expected punishment, way higher that any society could afford in case of traffic control.

If you want people to stop, you've got to build the infrastructure in a way that makes it psychologically natural to stop. Some paint on an otherwise Amercan road won't do shit. You've got to visually and physically narrow the space for drivers to make it uncomfortable or even damaging for them to pass through at unsafe speed.

That low speed is also slow enough that drivers don't feel like they're losing as much by stopping, making them feel like stopping for pedestrians is a lot more fair.

Look at Dutch traffic engineering standards for pedestrian crossings. They're a car-centric country that puts a lot of effort into getting cars everywhere in a relatively safe way.

You can do the same thing without cops more cheaply in the long run. Just raising the crosswalks to sidewalk height completely changes driver behavior, as it's both a speed bump, and it's clearly communicated that the crosswalk is the pedestrians' territory that the driver is crossing through.

We can deal with most of these issue through design rather than a threat of fines.

I'm not convinced it's all about enforcement. In Portland, Oregon, there's not much threat of enforcement but cars stop at the slightest hint of a pedestrian crossing anywhere. Not sure how they pulled it off but there it's a culture thing, not enforcement.

The French will try to run you over, and the Italians actively speed up when they see a pedestrian.

In the UK you actually do have to stop and people do even Audi drivers stop sometimes.