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Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

It's a purely emotional response about what a parent can control. Driving the kids to school, you have some control over the situation; e.g. you can swerve out of the way of a potential accident. When they walk alone to school, there is nothing you can do to help them or prevent accidents from happening and that lack of control opens up the imagination to all sorts of scary things.

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Why can you swerve out of the way of a car, but you can't jump out of the way?

It's EXTREMELY uncommon for cars to Grand-Theft-Auto-style run people down walking on the sidewalk.

~80% of pedestrian deaths happen when it's dark.

There's about ~19 pedestrians that get killed by cars per day. Only ~4 during day time.

You have a higher chance being in a random mass shooting. Worrying about getting killed by a car in broad daylight is silly.

I didn't check your pedestrian deaths during the daytime statistics, but ~4 per day would be ~1400 a year. I did check the number of mass shooting victims, and in 2019 (the most recent year for which data is really meaningful) the total was 180 (~.5 a day), of which 71 were deaths (~.2 a day)[1], or about 20x less likely than getting killed by a car during the daytime.

That's pedantic, but I just wanted to clarify because mass shootings are also in the news.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/811504/mass-shooting-vic...

There's different measures for mass shootings.

By some measures (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...) - this year there are ~1.8 per day.

So you're about twice as likely to be killed by a car in daylight as a pedestrian as you are to be killed in a mass shooting.

Your point stands. I overestimated.

It being all about control is spot on.

While it’s possible and maybe even likely that I overrate my own driving ability, I’ve never been in an accident in 20+ years and drive in a paranoid, defensive, assume-everyone-is-crazy style that I feel must push the statistics in my favor quite a bit.

So despite statistics I tend to worry more about other things. I also have a hard time with my 3 year old daughter being driven by others unless I’ve seen their driving firsthand. There are people I know who I flat out won’t allow to drive her and it has created some awkward situations. I will also only let her go in an Uber/taxi if there’s no other option.

The world is bigger than the USA. The chances of getting caught in a mass shooting are lower than you are estimating, and pedestrians are more impacted by automobiles.

We have those viruses and diseases too, you know.

Your numbers and statements seem logical but can you provide any datasets to support? I’m slightly surprised a random mass shooting would be a higher likelihood than something automotive related.

It has to do with at what percentile of wary and being good drivers we think we are. Also abduction is not the only risk for children.

I believe that often than not people do the right thing, if it something done in mass there is a reason for it and it is just hard to pin point the reason.

There can be social reasons for it, also we don't know if there is some implicit higher chances of getting abducted for kids who get drove to school. Like them walking to school will increase the chance of them abducted.

That sense of control is a dangerous illusion, though. Cars move way too fast for people to be able to react when something unexpected happens. Drivers included.

> That sense of control is a dangerous illusion, though. Cars move way too fast for people to be able to react when something unexpected happens. Drivers included.

That's a dangerous fatalistic (literally) assumption. One must train and practice car control. Which unfortunately isn't required in the US, but training is available for those who seek it.

A driver can most certainly safely control mostly any slide or emergency manouver. But it does take training and regular practice.

I regularly drive on Hwy 17 (a windy highway in the hills just south of silicon valley) and have witnessed countless times cars which start to slide and the driver panics and doesn't know what to do so they end up crashing. But watching the slide, all of them would've been easy to control by a driver exposed to a decent amount of car control training. It's unfortunate we allow people to drive without requiring car control school and frequent referesher training.

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