unless you find yourself between the car and a stationary object, the few thousand pounds of car has no influence here. I do agree though that a human body traveling at 5MPH do carry way more momentum than many realize.
no one said anything at all about excusing the behaviour, the argument I see is that an excessive amount of mind space and resources is spent combating it. I don't think you intentionally created a straw man, but a straw man you did create.
Escalators have two failure modes: stairs, and meat grinder. Fortunately the former is the more common of the two.
Wok is dead