There is absolutely no correlation real or hypothetical between property value and amount of property to the use of services.

A longer street frontage requires more asphalt and concrete and buried infrastructure than a shorter street frontage, and it requires police and fire response to travel a longer distance.

We have far fewer roads shared among a smaller amount of people but they are much lower quality.

And that's how it should be, because the usual alternative is for urban areas to heavily subsidize the less urbanized areas.

Maybe the poor could afford to cover their benefits if we didn't force them to live a middle-class lifestyle.

As they should, because those with the most property benefit the most from city infrastructure, police and fire services, and national defense. Our society was built upon the understanding that those who benefit the most from something should pay the most.

Yellow - if far enough in advance of intersection, come to a stop; if not far away enough to stop safely, proceed with caution

No, yellow means the light is about to turn red. It is implied that a motorist may stop, but is not required to.

Flashing red - Do not enter intersection; if already crossing street, proceed quickly to other side
Red - Do not enter intersection

Those two mean exactly the same thing.

Lane splitting is legal in California. The motorcycle handbook says "Never operate directly alongside another rider" but is it illegal?

California only says drivers "shall yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian crossing the roadway within any...crosswalk at an intersection." There may be cities in California that prohibit cars from entering a crosswalk while a pedestrian is using it, but that one's not a California law.

violation of law for pedestrian to walk against light

Yes, that is also true. But why do motorists get a yellow phase while pedestrians have no yellow phase and two red phases (flashing don't walk and solid don't walk)? This only further reinforces the motorist superiority complex.

The more fundamental problem is that traffic engineers in the USA don't distinguish between streets (short segments of road with lots of buildings and driveways) and non-street roads (connections between places). Consequently, they design these street/road hybrids that have many intersections, like streets, but also high speed limits, like roads. And then to try to overcome a limitation of the hybrid street/road design, they prioritize traffic speed and throughput over safety, where you or I would make safety the first priority. As part of that, they removed roadside trees because motorists kept hitting them. So now without trees protecting pedestrians, the same motorists hit pedestrians instead. How's that for progress?

Traffic engineers had a problem to solve: too many pedestrians were getting hit by cars while using the crosswalks at intersections because they didn't know when the 'WALK' sign would change.

No, that's not the reason. Pedestrians have the right of way when they are in crosswalks, so cross traffic must stop even if it has the green. Putting in a countdown timer to tell pedestrians to hurry up only serves to reinforce the false idea that pedestrians are inferior to motorists. So the countdown timer was for the benefit of motorists, not pedestrians.

No, pedestrians were getting hit because the motorists simply didn't obey the law. This is why some cities conduct "crosswalk stings" where a plainclothes police officer crosses a street to see if any motorists violate his/her right of way, and points those motorists out to a waiting motorcycle officer. They catch a surprising number of scofflaws this way, especially at unmarked crosswalks.

For example, IBM and Oracle contribute to Linux in the form of paying employees to add features they need. Clearly this is not charity.

Why can't something be both charitable and self-serving at the same time, like getting your name engraved on a donor wall? Arguments from Bible don't count.

Does it often happen that a change to open source software benefits only one person or organization?