http://www.wired.com/2015/02/on-the-joy-of-mastery/Risk Homeostasis....
here's an excerpt from the article :
3. Danger May Be Safer
Last month, one of the smartest economists in the world passed away. His name was Gordon Tullock. He spent his life studying how people made choices, and that led him to rethink everything we know about risk.
He showed that people have a fairly consistent attitude to danger. If you make an activity safer, people push the limits of that activity to bring the risk back up to a level they find accessible. Take driving. Put ABS brakes in a car, and people just tend to brake later, and less. Traction control just makes us less careful in slippery conditions. Risk homeostasis, as it’s known, has been observed everywhere from football helmets to oilrigs.
Some say that Tullock came up with a fabulous piece of design logic: if you want to reduce accidents, install a sharp spike pointing outwards from the steering wheel of every car, aimed at the driver’s heart.
User friendly? No. But it would certainly make everybody drive very, very carefully.
something we've all suspected, on autos.. someone who studied risks all his life confirms it.
Now we should ban airbags, ABS, TC, winter tires... make everything more difficult about driving, and it will be a safer road...