Given a long enough time in risky circumstances (vs a few months of single-mode behaviour, hitchhiking, in your example) the experience would start to get pretty compelling. I think the cited six years is probably good enough to get a good feel for the risk level, especially since you presumably hear about other incidents from peers and develop an intuition for risky situations.

edit: data tangent - if your Anchorage stats were about reported cases, the averages would need correcting for underreporting.