Incidentally, the regularity of pedestrians being killed by drivers - to the extent that many folks (sorry, anecdata) blame the pedestrian more than the driver because walking is seen as the aberration, is my biggest fear about letting a kid run about. Funny enough people move their families to the suburbs for "safety', thereby increasing their miles driven and increasing the kid's risk of getting killed by a car.

There are so many potential biases involved, that I'm not sure I would use "hearing it on the news" as a statistical metic to drive my personal evaluation.

Obviously, if you're using it to set policy, some kind of study would be valuable.