Is there an inherent danger in travel?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The question comes from the seemingly universal low-grade worry about people taking off for vacations. For example, if Mr. Athena and I take off for the weekend, my parents always like it when we call and say we arrived at our destination safely. Lately I hear people are worried about flying in reaction to terrorism threats.

So what’s the dope? Is there an inherent danger in travel?

Assume you live in a relatively safe small town or city in the US, and are travelling to some larger urban areas in either the US, Canada, or Western Europe. In the cities, assume you’ll be visiting and staying in the touristy spots. In other words, you’re not going to Beirut or South Central LA for vacation - you’re going to, for examle, London, and will be staying in London’s center. You’re not going to be running around the icky areas at 3am or anything like that. Just plain ol’ basic touristy type stuff - museums, maybe taxis to restaurants at night, that kind of thing.

I would guess that any increase in the time you spend in a car carries risk. But is it different to be in a car for 8 hours travelling to Destination X as opposed to being in a car for 8 hours driving around your own area?

Crime rate probably matters, too. If you live in an area with very low crime rate and travel to an area with a higher crime rate, that’s a risk. But is it significant, given that most vacation destinations are more or less safe?

What about plane travel? There’s a lot of hype about terrorism lately, and of course there’s the good old fashioned plane crash. But as far as I know, air travel is still considered very safe.

What am I missing here?

2

People bring much of the danger with them.

When some people travel, they forget everything they ever knew about politeness, good manners, discression, or even minimally acceptable social behavior.

50 miles from home…BAM! They transform into a one-man (or woman) Barbarian Horde.

If I saw it once, I saw it 100 times, back when I worked at Disney.

Rudeness, drunkeness, sexual promiscuity, violence, ugly Hawaiian shirts that they wouldn’t be caught dead wearing at home…it all gets turned loose on vacation-time.

Not just Americans, either. Euros & Japanese, too.

The real danger comes of playing the darn fool, & paying for it.

3

I think you’re missing the part where she’s your mother. Mothers worry, it’s our job. :wink:

But beyond that, I think there’s an even deeper, visceral primordial anxiety produced when traveling - both by the traveller and the traveller’s family. You’re leaving the tribe, striking out for new and possibly dangerous territory. You might get eaten by a mastadon, fall off a cliff with no one around to help you or even marry someone from a foreign tribe and never bring your precious genetics back home!

Considering that there are real dangers in being alone in the wilderness or in rival territory, as well as imagined ones, I have no trouble WAGing that our ancestors who weren’t anxious when leaving the tribe (and so did it more often and for longer periods of time) died at a younger age (or became loners who didn’t reproduce - evolutionarily, the same thing), so we “anxious travellers” became the reproductive norm.

4

It’s always the small-town peeps who worry about terrorism. Tell your mom not to worry.

What is it about people in the little towns in the middle of the country getting all worked up about terrorism? You don’t see NY or LA people getting up in arms. And if terrorists are going to go after a plane, it’s not like they blow up Boise to LA.

Tell your mom that.

5

There is a certain amount of inconvenience associated with stuff that goes wrong when you are out of town as opposed to at home. Thus, it is reasonable to worry more about such things going wrong when you are on the road.

Example: Dad locked his keys in the car recently. He then called Mom on her cell phone, and she agreed to come bring him a spare key (as soon as she could get home to do so. Probably 15 minutes.) Had Dad been out of town, he would have had to think of some other way to get a spare key–or more likely call a locksmith or someone. Since he’d also left the lights on on his car, he might then have had to deal with a dead battery. Had he locked his keys in the car while Mom and I were out of town (we’d been travelling and had just called to say that we’d reached the city limits), he’d have had to walk home, or call a taxi, or call a friend to get a ride home to get the spare key.

Yes, there is now a spare key in his wallet–as there usually is, but hadn’t been since he took it in for repairs. He doesn’t do this kind of thing often, but one feels really stupid when one is in a predicament caused entirely by one’s own actions.

But in general, I think the situation you describe is less caused by the dangers and inconvenience of travel, and more by the “Dorm Mom Effect.”

The Dorm Mom Effect is the phenomena wherein a college age student comes home for a break, used to being able to stay up all night without anyone worrying about him or her, and finds out that Mom wants to know where the student is going, with whom, when he or she will be back, etc.

Mom says “I worry about you”.

Kid says “if you knew what I’d been up to at school you’d really worry.”

Mom says " You might be right, but I don’t know that you aren’t home at a reasonable hour so I don’t worry about you. Now that you are home, I know, and so I worry"

Mom and Kid are both happy when break is over and kid goes back to living in a dorm, where no one worries about bedtime.

I think the same thing often applies when people are traveling. Yes, one can be in an accident commuting to and from work, or driving to the grocery store, but people don’t know that you are out doing so. But when you leave the house of your parent, and hit the road, whether it is a half hour drive, or twelve hours (or more) people know that you are on the road, and they worry about you.

6

Sure, a lot of the ‘danger’ is perceived, rather than real. As pointed out, it’s probably a lot safer to travel 2,000 miles by air, even nowadays, than 20 miles by highway.

There’s probably some danger to travel, often because the traveler is a stranger who doesn’t know the local customs, doesn’t know exactly where the bad neighborhoods are, doesn’t know exactly what the legitimate money exchange rate is, et cetera.

And some of the perceived fear of traveling is perhaps the anxiety that hits some of us, sometimes, sort of a home-sickness offshoot. Doesn’t get me too badly, but my gut will sometimes start feeling that hey, I am a long way from home. The feeling goes away after an hour or so.