At least motorists do not drive along the pavement!
Please, do not drive. Ever. You clearly do not have enough observation skills to be a safe driver if you don't notice drivers on pavements on the regular.
For starters, every single car that is parked on the pavement got there by driving on it. Nothing gets me grumbling like a "large blind spots - pedestrians stay clear from this vehicle" style sticker on a van parked on a pavement. It's just so normalised people don't even registers it when it happens and if they do the every day absolution kicks off "well he has a delivery to make, you can't expect him to drive around looking for a space, and he'll only be here for a minute once he stops"; "well they have to keep getting things in and out of the van and otherwise they would block the road" and even if they kill someone while doing so there will be no charges (see Esme Weir, Lennon Toland those are just off the top of my head but I'm sure if you start looking into it you'll find more).
There's also the ones who are too impatient to wait for a driver to turn right and who feel OK to mount the pavement to go around them.
And the ones who think filtering measures don't apply to them and will drive on the pavement to get around bollards.
And the impatient ones who drive on the pavement because sitting in traffic or behind the bin men isn't for them.
If you don't believe me, you can see some motorists totally not driving on the pavement here
and here
(I could feel a page of those)
While we are here and since you "not all motorist"-ed further down. Drivers kill about 5 pedestrians a week on average. The vast majorities of fatal incidents happen on the road but of the pedestrians they kill, 35 to 40 a year they kill while they are on pavements. On average cyclist kill 2 pedestrians a year and usually the fatal pedestrian vs cyclist collisions didn't happen on a pavement. So whilst it's annoying and can be stressful if your balance is iffy or your bones are fragile or your vision is limited, you are still in a lot less danger from an inconsiderate cyclist passing you too close while walking on a pavement than you are from drivers.
I saw you also mentioned the "but it's illegal", well it is except when it's not, many local authorities just slap a shared path sign on and call it infrastructure and the minister's guidance and where it's not shared space the police guidance is that enforcement should be on a case to case basis and to basically only intervene if it's blatantly inconsiderate. I can assure you that the vast majority of people who ride on pavements aren't happy with the arrangement either (it's slow, too stop-start, it's not continuous and there's a loss of priority at each intersection and on the whole they are aware that they would get hurt too in a collision) but the vroom-vrooms have claimed all the space and any attempt to reclaim it gets shouted down so you get to share the crumbs until political vision changes.
I'm a driver, I have never killed or injured anyone. Do I "not all driver" ? I don't because even a cursory glance at statistic is enough to establish that as a category drivers are pretty lethal to people who aren't enclosed in metal and that's even before looking at emissions and particulates.
Do you also go below the line to "not all men" when people talk about an incident where they were harassed?
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