the simple fact was that nobody drove dangerously through this intersection, precisely because the intersection felt dangerous. Welcome to the world of risk homeostasis, a very real place that exists well outside the blinkered gaze of the traffic engineering profession. Risk homeostasis describes how people automatically adjust their behavior to maintain a comfortable level of risk. It explains why poisoning deaths went up after childproof caps were introduced—people stopped hiding their medicines—and why the deadliest intersections in America are typically the ones you can navigate with one
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