It’s fascinating to me what a different view of risk we had in the past.
The no damage being caused on the surface was a “new fact”. That would never fly today, for better or for worse.
replies(1):
The no damage being caused on the surface was a “new fact”. That would never fly today, for better or for worse.
Aside from that, culturally the value we impart on a single human life has also changed too - death used to be much more common, infant death in particular - its not uncommon to go to an old cemetery and see a single family having buried three or more children, with another 2-3 having survived to adulthood. This was not something limited to the lower classes either, Calvin Coolidge had a son who died of sepsis from a blister while he was president.
An illustrating example might also be the US cities like Seattle that have their "vision zero" programs. A "vision", and related actions, to get to zero traffic related deaths or serious injuries every year. It's the official position of these city governments that literally any non-zero death rate is unacceptable. No matter how low the death rate is (and it's already very low). They officially accept zero risk. Is that reasonable? Is it even about the death rate or something else? Either way, it's fully undebatable.
Part of this is driven by the social media discourse and polarization - We essentially had a whole bunch of ideas which were outside of the window of normal discourse that have now been adopted as ideology and dogma by their respective camps. Once an idea is dogma/key ideological tenant it's really hard to challenge it.
Vision Zero should be viewed for what it is.. as a dumb idea.
As I understand it 'vision zero' type programs are often an aspirational goal, and they implicitly recognize the near impossibility of reaching the goal, but that near impossibility doesn't make the goal undesirable or not worth striving for.
If you set such a goal you start to analyze the systems involved which cause accidents and deaths in a different way and you seek change them on a fundamental level to significantly reduce if not outright eliminate the possibility of certain categories of accidents entirely.
So instead of doing moderately effective but ultimately fleeting stuff like cracking down on speeders and drunk drivers through police action you redesign the infrastructure so that it becomes much harder for a car to physically strike pedestrians through traffic calming[0] measures, creating physically separate pedestrian and bike infrastructure so that cars just don't come in contact with people, or implement mass transit so that you simple decrease the number of drivers on the road and again physically separate them from automobiles to eliminate the possibility that they're involved in car accidents.
In doing so you not only reduce the number of accidents that injure and maim people but you induce them to be more physically active and therefore healthier so that they're able to better car accidents, slips and falls, and illnesses which ends up paying for the infrastructure improvements over the long run.
This is so much better than the alternative where speeders consistently speed and kill pedestrians in an unmarked cross walk so we decide to play whack-a-mole by increasing the police budget for photo radar for a while until the public forgets that this particular street is dangerous to cross on foot.