[gumby]

> She also carried around a scalpel and tubing for giving passers-by emergency airways (tracheotomy?), and apparently did so over a dozen times.

My mother does the same (well did, she's retired. She was an ER doctor). Before seatbelts and other safety devices were common there were a lot of gruesome accidents on the roads and we would have to stop. I remember several episodes were my sister and I were bored and annoyed because my mother had departed in the ambulance and my dad would drive us to the hospital to wait for her. Kid's perspective.

I've been trained to do emergency procedures like a tracheotomy, move a patient with a back injury* et al and in my life have encountered zero situations where my so-called "skills" would be useful. I don't even drive past many car accidents any more, nor have I ever seen a diner choke to the point where they needed assistance. But as a child I knew several kids who'd been hit by cars or fallen out of trees and been hospitalized, not to mention kids who'd lost a parent. Has the world become safer?

* Obviously you only do this when the victim would be in even more and immediate danger where they are, else you leave 'em in place for the professionals.

[bobthepanda]

The world is safer, kind of, but we also now heavily discourage activities deemed to be unsafe, and may have erred too far in that direction.

In the US, walking and biking to school has declined from nearly half in 1969 to 13% today. A Vancouver BC man recently won a lawsuit after he was taken through the child protective services wringer for letting his kids ride the bus unsupervised. While overall traffic deaths are down, the fatality rate for pedestrians is shooting up.

We have basically created a world where only car travel is safe, and where we explicitly and implicitly encourage driving and discourage walking to get anywhere.