well first of all I think it's ironic that you seem to live in San Francisco and are complaining about wide streets. What I've seen of the city has some of the most impractical streets in the country. The more dense the area, the narrower the streets. Not to mention the ridiculously steep hills and having to dodge the trolleys. The roads are narrow enough without having to do triple duty as parking areas, trolleyways and (thirdly) roads. The first time I saw it, I just had to laugh; it seemed to me like the city was one big joke, an amusement park rather than a place that was meant to be livable.
There is a suburb of Phoenix, to the east, called Mesa. It's an old Mormon town that wasn't intended to be a suburb but has become one due to the sprawl. They take great pride in the fact that downtown was planned to have wide streets from the beginning, and Main Street has never needed to be widened. There is a big landscaped median and 2 or 3 lanes on each side, and still room for parking on both sides too. I always thought that really was a good idea; streets are meant to be driven on for the most part, and wide ones definitely favor the vehicle traffic. (Even though Mesa was planned back in the horse-and-carriage days.) I'm aware of the school of thought that says vehicles should be discouraged in dense areas and people should walk everywhere. Maybe they're right, I'm not quite sure. It only works if you can really do everything you ever want to do within an area of a few blocks though; it seems like maybe that's what San Francisco is trying to shoot for. But most people that live there face long commutes to work don't they? San Francisco is effectively a suburb, but because cars are so impractical, people who live there and work elsewhere in Silicon Valley have to deal with 1-2 hour bus or subway commutes.
I like the idea of the moving walkways, progressively faster ones next to each other, that were envisioned in some scifi novel I haven't read yet (a coworker was telling me about them).
But I agree with most of the rest of your missive. Curbs around parking lots, or between adjacent parking lots, are one of my dad's favorite rants and he likes driving over them in his truck just for the heck of it. Left arrows suck most of the time; they are only useful when a really big fraction of the traffic is likely to turn left. And I just hate all the speed bumps and dips and stuff. They punish everybody for the recklessness of a very very few jerks. I'm known for being a speed demon myself, especially on the freeway, but what makes it safely possible is the predictable nature of the traffic and extreme attentiveness. I don't go speeding through the residential areas and resent having to come to a near full stop for a speed bump. Most of the people on my street are fairly lackadaisical, not "community leader" types, but I have neighbors a couple houses down who want a speed bump (ironic since there is already a dip in the road right in front of their house, and one of their favorite pastimes is to sit on their patio and laugh at anybody who bottoms out while trying to zip through there). I have made it clear to them I don't want one and will fight it if given a chance. But I guess votes on these things are taken at neighborhood association meetings so I will probably miss the chance to object. So far so good.
The snootiest 'burb here is Scottsdale, where function always yields to beauty. The city is known for spending months tearing up roads just to make things prettier in some way. The city is a very long, narrow one with two main arterial roads running north and south: Scottsdale Road and Hayden. At any given time, somewhere in the city there will always be a major traffic snarl where you can't easily get from one end to the other because of construction. Scottsdale also has trailing green arrows on their intersections (meaning the left turn arrow comes after the green light instead of before). It might be a superior way of doing things but it confuses people by not following the standard in the rest of the Valley. Main Street in Mesa and Scottsdale Road both have the problem of going through a very light-ridden, slowed down "old-town" area for a few blocks. In the case of Scottsdale you just have to know the shortcuts to get around it, or it might take you half an hour to get through those few blocks when the traffic is heavy.
I like your calculations about how much time the traffic engineers are wasting us relative to how much time we lose if we get killed. I just hope that if I'm ever in a really really bad accident that I do get killed, and then I probably won't care anymore after that. Meanwhile I'd just as soon save time on a daily basis even at a slightly increased risk. As usual America continues to value safety above freedom.
Another point that has been brought up elsewhere is that some places in Europe, intersections are handled with a thing called a "roundabout" which from what I've heard, is a place where all traffic goes around in a circle, and you can go off on a tangent onto one of the intersecting streets, or merge into the circular flow to go from one street onto another. Everyone is equally inconvenienced - if you're going straight you still have to go at least halfway around the circle once - but traffic flows continuously; you get all the degrees of freedom of a typical intersection without any lights or stopped traffic.
I've always figured there must be some way to design an intersection so that no traffic ever has to stop.
I think as density increases we will have to come up with ever more clever solutions. There probably isn't much chance for a return to country roads with no lines and no lights, as appealing as it would be. Unless we first find some way to control population growth without infringing anybody's rights.