[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.