This is the crux of the issue on why we as a society ignore car crashes and panic about train/plane crashes.
I'd wager it mostly comes down to filtering out things we feel we have control over stressing about those we don't.
One I found especially interesting is specifically about how improving safety features may not reduce accidents as much as it could, because when people feel safer, they tend to take greater risks [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation#Peltzman_eff...
Are you a good enough driver to save yourself in this situation?
Do I have absolute complete control over it? No. Do I have a whole lot of control over it? You betcha. The control is not an illusion.
Are you a good enough pedestrian to dodge a drunk that jumps the curb?
That's a rhetorical question. My point here is that the standard you're trying to apply is an asinine one. Unless you live beside the train station you have some exposure to drunk drivers.
> https://litter.catbox.moe/ed5an4.webm
No. Nothing the camera car driver could've done to see or avoid that one.
But surely you realize that's not a very common scenario crash. Watch the endless youtube dashcam videos of crashes, the vast majority are simple scenarios where the driver could've done something smarter than what they did.
It is not an illusion that the car driver is in control of the car and their decisions.
It is an euphemism to call car crashes "accidents" because the vast majority were not an accident that simply randomly happened, it was an event the driver could have avoided by making better choices (e.g. call that cab instead of driving drunk, etc).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.#Death
Needless to say we should wear seatbelts even in the backseat of an automobile.
9/11 is a better example of what you're talking about, where a genuine disaster was so traumatic as to reshape the whole society in ways often detached from risk or rationality.
I'd double-down on that same wager …