[gracenotes]

It's worth looking at "for no reason" in greater detail for cars, which is different from those other medical cases in significant ways. We collectively as a society decided that motorization of roads was worth pursuing at the expense of human health and safety, if you look at rhetoric at the time of cars' introduction, in no small part due to input from car manufacturers. This wasn't about driving skills; it was about restructuring all of society to make cars close to the bottom rung, not infrequently at the expense of minority groups. More recently, car-related deaths occur from bad design and usually refusal to fix it until sufficiently many lives have been taken. Any kind of "Vision Zero" which is focused on enforcement rather than infrastructure fixes is bound to fail.

So if "bad things happen to good people for no reason" is unpalatable and it's the narrative for mass transit, and "bad things happen to drivers for reasons in their control" is the easy narrative for cars, I'd say "bad things happen to good people for reasons that are in our control but we still do nothing" is closer to the true narrative for cars, but it is also unpalatable. There is an element of this in many risk-related scenarios, but it is especially clear here.