Sometimes I scoff at the Health and Safety laws we have in the UK (It can get a little draconian sometimes), but then I look at what happens in a country where no such thing exists (or little application of it).
The UK has so much good design in all the systems where humans are concerned, from clear signage to walking surfaces, plus checks and balances to provide for redundancy, that you start taking it all for granted.
India on the other hand - I'm of Indian heritage - is a chaotic hellscape where life is cheap. I have an apartment there and recently smooke started pouring out a water pump, somebody mentioned it on the Whatsapp group and eventually someone went to investigate and found it burnt out. You can see so many problems here:
1) Response time slow 2) Problem not treated urgently 3) No electrical cut out 4) No temperature cut out
Basically the sort of thing that you would find sixty years ago in the UK, a malfunctioning device can simply carry on malfunctioning to the extent that it could cause a fire in an entire apartment block. The UK is not immune from this - see Grenfell fire where bad cladding caused many deaths - but we have a full-scale public inquiry and legislation and a lot of very pissed-off people in comparison.
It's step-by-step, building on top of the previous thing, slowly inculating into the population the respect for life and how it's the responsibility of every person, company and government. You belt up, cars add airbags, the government improves roads and traffic management. If all of those things are in place, things get better. In India, it's very much "god will protect me".
My own attitude changes so bizarrely when I'm in India. In Europe it's belt up, put your helmet on, and in India, let's all get into this Autorickshaw and hurtle through traffic. I must be mad.
It was actually around World War I that these kind of safety issues became well known to the public. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the books of Upton Sinclair, and the muckrakers started to bring awareness to a lot of formerly ignored problems like this.
the lack of speed limits on many highways, or only two lanes on others, which leads to many more lane-changing manouevres between high- and low-speed lanes; or very short-throw entry and exit lanes with extremely sharp curves and abrupt changes of speed; lack of organization and coordination around road-works to provide safe alternatives; the multitude of badly-designed junctions; terrible signage blocking traffic lights and visibility of oncoming traffic; the lack of ice and snow clearance on roads and pavements and cycle lanes; And I say this as someone who rides my bicycle every weekday to get to class. It's been a nightmare and I've just fitted studded tyres which has massively helped. In the UK, these routes would have been cleared.
I mean, both countries are pretty safe on the global scale of things, so we're complaining about things of a high standard to start with, but the figures kind of bear this out:
(ODS file: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65143a89b1bad...)
And the UK (or Great Britain which is just the mainland) had 706 car user deaths in 2021 compared with 1118 in Germany which is quite considerable. Injuries are harder to compare because of the variation in severity and the scale by which they are measured, but a dead body is a dead body. Fatalities means deaths occurring within 30 days of an RTA.
So when you get to Road Deaths, as opposed to car users, Germany jumps to 2562 deaths in 2021 vs 1608 for the UK, and that is 31/million pop vs 24/million pop to normalize things (no normalized figures on the sheet for car users).
The person I was visiting lived in a student dorm / residence hall at the time. They had special fire doors in the middle of most long hallways, they were wired up to the fire alarm system and would magnetically shut down if an alarm was raised. When shut, they separated different parts of the hallway from each other and prevented the fire from spreading, and you had to hold them open if you wanted to pass through. There were also some extremely strict rules around what electric devices you were allowed to have, with staff being authorized to enter people's rooms with notice and do compliance checks.
Here in Poland (which is an EU country presumably following all EU-mandated safety rules), the regulations in such buildings are usually along the lines of "do whatever as long as you don't cause property damage and/or permanent changes, we might do a check if you do something really egregious and other residents complain." No fire doors of course, although smoke detectors and PA systems for alarms do exist.