There is an intersection about a mile from my work where a 40 mph North-South road with 4 lanes of traffic and a shared center left-turn lane intersects a 30 mph E-W road with 2 traffic lanes and 2 right-turn lanes. The intersection has traffic signals. Crossing east in the crosswalk is almost unthinkably dangerous, even on foot. I was hit there last year by a left-turning van and have had numerous close calls there both before and since then. Coincidentally, my cousin operates a business next to this intersection. He says that his workers will not use the crosswalk there to get lunch anymore. They jump in their cars just to cross the street.
In the three years I have been commuting, I have reduced the frequency of occassions in which I have to lock up the brakes to avoid collisions. When I started out, I was riding about a mile on the sidewalk each way and was locking up the brakes twice a day on average. When I looked at it, I noticed that over 90% of my lockups happened while attempting to cross driveways on the sidewalk or to cross side streets in a crosswalk. When I changed my route to avoid this sidewalk and ride with traffic on a different, lower traffic road, my lockup rate dropped to once per week. Better bike lighting (blinding daytime front strobe) reduced it a bunch more. Some of the reduction was also probably due to my riding skills improving. I am currently down to about 1 lockup per month, and they are mostly at this one intersection. I pretty much have to approach this intersection from the south on the left sidewalk for about 100 yds and turn right at the light. I will typically wait on the sidewalk until I have a green light and walk light, and then attempt to cross in the crosswalk. Even with a bright white strobe on the back of my helmet, most cars will not look to the right before they make their right turns. I am not able to move out into the E-W traffic lane on a green light because of the constant stream of right-turning cars blocking the N-S crosswalk. Yelling at them doesn't seem to help and there is not enough room to get around them. I recently began heading west (opposite of the direction I need to go) on the grass alongside the E-W road until I could get in behind the traffic at the light, pull a u-turn into traffic and then proceed vehicularly in the traffic lane back eastward through the intersection. This had been working quite well until last week, when this grassy area was covered about a foot deep with plowed snow. I then began to head west before the intersection through parking lots and cross-country through some not so deep snow until I could come out on the cross street west of the intersection and again, pass through it using the traffic lane.
Life is much better now that I am no longer using that crosswalk.