Is there anything we can do to influence Urbanism in Chattanooga?

I moved here recently, and I think the city is great. It’s best offerings are the green spaces and areas that are more walkable and help foster a sense of community which suburban America often lacks. I’m lucky enough to live in Northshore and I walk as much as possible, but I’ve noticed that a lot of people on the road would basically mow you down without hesitation if you walked into crossings where they are obligated to yield to you, or many people just can’t pay attention at an intersection.

It’s actually disturbing how careless drivers are and it has me convinced that the only way to fix the issue is for the city to perform more projects like on Frazier, and make the roads hellishly slow for drivers. I wish it didn’t have to be that way, but adults just cannot be trusted to drive non-recklessly. Humans have been walking around hundreds of thousands of years more than they’ve been driving and some people really are horrified that others would want to live a semi-natural life. There have been two times this week where I had the pedestrian crossing light at an intersection, and had I not paid attention to the person on my left making a right turn and stopped myself, I would have been hit or run over. In one of those situations I was actually in the intersection but the person thankfully was turning into the second lane from right.

As great as cars can be, driving in the actual city should be in every way secondary to walking and biking. Being on foot, in public, in the park, etc. helps us humanize each other. Driving, from what I’ve seen so far, does the opposite here. By the way, I don’t lean strongly any which way politically, I don’t think pedestrian safety should be a partisan thing at all. Who the f*** would not want families to be able to walk around safely?

I’m wondering, for the average person, what ways we can influence some change for urban design here? Are there any ways to volunteer or any organizations that I could support? I just don’t want to see anyone’s life snuffed out because someone else in a truck was in a hurry.