"Normal people" have been on overcrowded trains with spotty service. They know what putting someone else in charge of how, when and where they can travel inevitably turns out.
"Normal people" also know multiple people who have died in car accidents. They also struggle to walk up a flight of stairs and hate their lives.
Once again, you cannot trust what so-called "normal people" say. Particularly when there's political pressure at play. I'll say it again, but plenty of people would happily shoot themselves if they got to pull the trigger.
Hyper-individualism of the US, and the rest of the West to a lesser extent, is a cancer. We work hard every single day to ignore it's plagues. The extreme cognitive dissonance our citizens are forced to produce means they're not reliable narrators.
The reality of the human condition is that humans will always GREATLY favor the status-quo, no matter what. Because they're already living it and, if they're not dying, they have a strong survival incentive to maintain it. Change is risk, and risk is bad.
When I get in my car to drive, I don't think "oh God this has the greatest chance of killing me out anything I can do". Even though it's true. Do you know why I don't think that?
Because that sucks ass. If I had to live like that, I'd probably kill myself. I'm here, with the status-quo. So, I must make the best of it.
I'm not unique. Every single person, you included, lives like this. You have no choice but to ignore as much of the bad shit as you can, because you can't fix it in your lifetime.
It's much easier, and better for your own health, to believe people are getting stabbed like kabobs in the subway and you're oh so safe and comfy in your nice suburban home. That's a much better thought process than the reality, which is that you're much more likely to die and it's not even close. So that's what you choose to believe and that's the belief you nourish.
It's comfirmation bias, but it's the life blood of the human condition. The alternative is worse.
