the irony is that you're far more likely to get killed in a car accident than by a serial killer on public transit.

If you want to start getting into who is irrationally afraid of what, I have this amusing comparison.

Studies seem to show that marathon runners die from cardiac arrest at the rate of one every 3 to 6 million miles. That is about 160 to 330 deaths per billion miles. By comparison motor vehicle fatality rates are about 12 per billion miles (including pedestrians). So I wonder if we should stop worrying about cars and serial killers and start worrying about running...

Ironically, I got my 1 in 3 million figure from the abstract of a paper with the opposite slant, which you may also find edifying:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18156224

Note that I translated hours to miles by multiplying 14 million hours by an average speed of 5.67 mph. This was taken from the following link, with the average time for the NYC marathon in 2016:

http://time.com/5007486/new-york-city-marathon-runners-slow/

There are a lot of broken people out there.

We're all broken. It's hard work sharing the world with other broken people, no doubt. I just don't think it's healthy to see it as a chore.