Not that big of a deal, grand scheme of things - accidents are rare. It's just that our tolerance for risk has gone down a lot over the last 50 years - likely b

Not that big of a deal, grand scheme of things - accidents are rare. It's just that our tolerance for risk has gone down a lot over the last 50 years - likely because of decreased other-cause mortality. When children were dying of disease, the relative risk of a car accident seemed small; now (with a safer world), it seems proportionally bigger. There's roughly 1/366,000 chance of getting into a car accident on any given mile driven (not a great thing to average out, but still, back of the hand calculation). I'm sure that adjusting for weather conditions could get that number down further (if you assume good weather). Let's say feed a child over the course of 10 miles: 1/36,600 chance of anything happening (hypothetically). Sure, if you do it every day that would be different - or if you live in an accident prone area that somehow skews the estimate. But the absolute risk, while there, is small. In many cases it's kind of like texting while driving - it surely increases risk, but it can't increase it a crazy amount given how much texting while driving we observe with only a slightly elevated accident rate. But on a nationwide scale, every accident is a tragedy.