Most of your accidents will occur while you’re close to home, because that’s where you likely will do most of your driving. It doesn’t really matter whether you get into a 30 mph collision on the boulevard next to your house or one three counties over…

I think the point was about the risk per baby-mile. If you’re going to fly and rent a car at the other side, you should bring the car seats. If you’re going to a metropolis with transit and walkability, maybe not. If an airport is a long distance from home, maybe so.

Decades ago, when I started hearing bad statistics that emphasized 'within 50 miles of home', I always thought that it was saying multi-hour roadtrips were automatically safer.

this makes a lot of sense. sure, "anything could happen", even in 50 miles, but the risk of an accident when driving a short distance is much less than the risk of an accident when driving longer distances.

this is simular to how the risk of contracting covid varies across different exposure scenarios. i'm hoping the pandemic will get us more used to thinking of risk on a continuum -- which may result in more sane policies around risk management.

I fear, wrt Covid19, it's the reverse - so many people saying masks are [totally] ineffective because breath can get around the sides.

It seems like the brainwashing that's been going on to convince people that they can't like policies, they have to be either political party A or party B has forced some notion of absolute bivalency in all matters -- everything is treated by a large proportion of the population as either 100% right or 100% wrong, subtlety seems to be entirely anathema.

"Can a viral spore get out of a mask? 'Yes', so noone should wear masks, they're an evil plot!" seems to be such a prevalent line of 'thinking'.

on the flip side, after six or seven months of quarantine, even the "safety at all costs!" crowd is figuring out how work limited social time into their lives.

On the other hand, the risk of a collision on city streets is much higher than on a highway.