Cars are not the only way to move people around. They are, however, the worst way to move people around. Take a bus and/or train, and you’ll never have to worry about parking again.

In response, more and more of our streets can be reclaimed for pedestrians spaces, adding walking/biking paths, adding greenery, adding outdoor patios, etc, instead of it all just going to ever increasingly large and crowded parking spaces and One More Lane™

From a physics perspective, yes it does. Not much, but yes it does do something.

In order for a crumple zone to work, the material must be at least slightly softer than the rest of the structure. When you have a collision, both the strong structure and the relatively weak crumple zones will flex, but the crumple zones will flex more. In a big collision, like with another car, they might flex so much they have permanent damage (the crumple), but even with a pedestrian they will flex a little. The more they flex, the more it cushions the impact for both the pedestrian and the occupants of the car.

As I said, the amount of cushion for the two parties is massively skewed in favor of the car, and crumple zones alone are not anywhere near enough to make cars safe for pedestrians. But objectively, yes they do slightly cushion the impact for a pedestrian, and in the perfect edge case collision it might mean the difference between life and death.

To an extent it’s both. I mean intent-wise it’s all about the occupants of the car, but as a side effect it also slightly reduces the impact on the pedestrian. The way I would think about it is that crumple zones on their own aren’t nearly enough to protect pedestrians, but removing them would be going completely in the wrong direction

Facebook did the same thing years ago, it’s part of the enshittification cycle. When you post a link to another site, you’re directing traffic away from twitter and it’s advertisers, so Elon would much prefer that you be forced to post the entire article so that no one ever has to leave twitter and give their ad revenue to anyone else.

Obviously no one would agree to this if it was happening from the start, but once your platform has a stranglehold on everyone, you can start tightening the noose like this. Everyone hates it, but people feel like they have nowhere else to go, so they put up with it. Or at least that’s what twitter’s betting on