Those numbers seem completely insane to me. Melbourne has a roughly similar population and in the last 10 years there were 3878 accidents in which pedestrians had to be hospitalised, and 274 pedestrian fatalities. Some of the infrastructure ideas seem pretty cool. We've got a bunch of raised crossings nearby which seem to do the job. Everyone turns into the street very carefully. I also like the idea of Scramble Crosswalks. What is the infrastructure in LA like for cyclists?
LA is actually four or five times larger than Melbourne (18.8 million). I suspect you're referring only to its inner city population, which is ~4 million. We count our urban population differently in Australia than the US does. If we take the number of pedestrian fatalities in greater Melbourne over five years (274/2=137, say) and multiply by 4, to bring it into proportion to greater LA, you get a figure (548) that is actually higher than LA...
Huh. I learnt something new today! I guess I need to improve my googling skills. A search for 'LA population' returned only the inner city figure. Again though, the numbers are making my head hurt. That means that the population of greater LA is almost 3x the population of Victoria. Squashed into 1/3 of the space. I guess we have a lot of empty space, huh?
It's great in some places, absolute shit in others. My friends in Seattle don't understand why on earth I'd ride a bike in Los Angeles, considering how clueless drivers are. And to be fair, I've only been hit hard enough to seek medical attention once. But that's the sort of thing that isn't supposed to happen.