I live in a semi-rural area and still I pick my times to be on the road. There are certain roads here that are just not safe to ride so I avoid them all together. Yes there are jerks driving cars, there are also jerks riding bikes.
The new bridge pedestrian over the Lehigh River in Jim Thorpe (PA) on the D&L Trail, when all is considered has a cost of over 5 million dollars. The main considerations for the location of the span was to link the very nice Lehigh Canal towpath from the south to the Lehigh Gorge State Park (Trail) to the north. They wanted to put bodies in the downtown area of Jim Thorpe. So a bridge span and about a mile of trail. There is another bridge over the Lehigh just before the trail enters the state park, this bridge shares the span with a working railroad. I'm not sure the cost of that crossing but I'm sure it was a million dollars. So six million dollars for one mile of trail. I love using the trail but six million dollars is a lot of money and we get to share the trail with hoards of out-of-towners that have little in the way of skills or trail etiquette. So I generally avoid using the trail during peak tourists times also.
It's not just riding bicycles on MUPS either. A half mile from my place is a lake on a state park with a swimming beach. Weekends and holidays during the season, the entire park is overflowing with visitors. Monday morning brings mountains of trash and litter all over the place, benches broken, signs missing, building spray painted. The only time I go there on the weekends is as a firefighter to put out dumpster fires or EMS assist for medical emergencies. It used to be when we visited areas for pleasure we had some respect for the locals but that was a long time ago. You cannot teach respect and niceness without first having a character building foundation. No one is going to be nice to their neighbor because they read a message about it on a billboard off the interstate.