I think you missed the point: the claim was that the obsession over safety (partially the kind that manifests in cases like this) is the culmination of a robust car culture. Things like this obviously don't happen overnight; they require decades of normalization (and, for car culture in particular, alienation).
This is exactly my point: "drug dealers and sex offenders" are on your mind, despite the US being an overwhelmingly safe and criminally uneventful place. Car culture encourages fixation on crime and risk, even when all available evidence points to the US being a radically safer place than it was even 30 years ago[1].
We're still not a safe country on an absolute scale (relative to our economic and social peers), but our cultural histrionics around crime are unsupported by the actual trendline.
The two are intertwined! "If it bleeds, it leads" works especially well on low-trust societies, and car culture enables and enforces low-trust social growth.
Put another way: the media might be a primary driver of the problem, but American culture is uniquely susceptible to it because of car dependence and the cultural/demographic structures that dependence incentivizes.
So can I, but I can't think of many that share the magnitude and ubiquity of cars!
(You shouldn't read this as a fixation or totem: there are plenty of other problems in this country. But it isn't a coincidence that aggressive deurbanization/suburbanization is closely tracked by increases in isolation, which in turn is tracked by a decline in personal trust[1].)
I can: the destruction of religion as a civic activity in the US. I'm not even religious but that's a huge one.
Another is the effort (by HUD and others) to eliminate regions of ethno-cultural homogeneity.
Both of these are A) much more numerically significant (on a per-capita basis) than changes in vehicle use since, say, 1950 and B) well-understood to reduce social factors like trust and cohesion.
