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Reading Risk on the Road: Why Travellers Fear the Wrong Things

Tell somebody you are going to Colombia and they will mention kidnapping. Tell them you are going to Egypt and they will mention terrorism. Tell them you are hiring a scooter in Vietnam and they will say have a lovely time.

The last of those three is, by a distance, the most likely thing on the list to kill you. This is not a clever paradox. It is the single most consistent finding in how human beings assess danger, it applies to experienced travellers as much as to nervous first-timers, and it is worth understanding because the mistakes it causes are not evenly distributed. They cluster precisely where the real risk sits.

The Things People Ask Me About

The questions arrive in a predictable order, and the order is almost exactly inverted.

Terrorism. Kidnapping. Violent crime by strangers. Sharks, occasionally, which is embarrassing for everybody. Political instability, usually in a country where the instability is confined to a province eight hundred miles from anywhere the questioner would go.

What nobody asks about: the road. The water. The altitude. The drink. The motorbike. The one hospital in a two hundred kilometre radius and whether your insurance will actually pay for the helicopter.

Availability, Not Arithmetic

The mechanism has a name. The availability heuristic: we estimate how likely something is by how easily an example comes to mind, and how easily an example comes to mind is determined by how vividly it was reported, not by how often it happens.

Nothing is more vivid than a terrorist attack, and nothing is less newsworthy than a road traffic collision. A minibus leaving a road in the Andes is a paragraph in a local paper. It is also, statistically, the shape of what actually happens to travellers.

The heuristic is not stupidity. It was an excellent rule when the only information reaching you was information about your own valley. It fails now for a specific and structural reason, which is that the news is a sample selected for rarity. The very fact that you heard about something is weak evidence that it is uncommon.

The Only Honest Number in the Room

It is worth noticing which industries are compelled to state their odds.

A licensed British operator such as the MrQ casino, running under a Gambling Commission licence since 2018, publishes a return to player figure in the information panel of every game. The house edge, quantified, printed, available before you stake anything, adults only. Whatever else one thinks about the activity, the price is disclosed.

Now consider the scooter rental in Hoi An. The dive shop in Utila. The night bus over the pass. The tour operator with the rusting cable and the enthusiastic guide. Not one of them will tell you the number, because nobody has ever required them to compute it, and if they had, a good many of them would struggle to keep trading.

Travel is an industry that sells risk and almost never quantifies it. That is worth holding in mind when a stranger assures you it is perfectly safe.

Where the Real Risk Actually Sits

Road traffic. It is not close. Two-wheeled vehicles in particular, ridden by people who have not ridden one at home, on roads with conventions they do not know, frequently without a helmet, occasionally after a drink. If you change one thing after reading this, change this one.

Water. Drowning takes a remarkable number of travellers, and almost all of it involves either alcohol, unfamiliar currents, or an overestimate of swimming ability formed in a municipal pool.

Altitude, which does not care how fit you are, and which kills people who ascend on a schedule set by a return flight.

Alcohol, which is the multiplier on all of the above rather than a separate category.

And medical access, which is the difference between an inconvenience and a catastrophe. The variable is not whether you get hurt. It is how far you are from a hospital that can help, and whether anybody is coming.

Base Rates Are Boring and Correct

The corrective is unglamorous: go and look at the base rates before you decide how frightened to be.

Road deaths per hundred thousand people, drowning rates, homicide rates disaggregated by region rather than by country. Compilations such as Our World in Data will give you all of this in an afternoon, and the numbers will reorganise your anxieties fairly violently. Countries you have been warned about will turn out to be safer than the one you live in. Activities nobody warned you about will turn out to be where the bodies are.

Then act on it, which mostly means buying a helmet, reading your insurance policy properly, drinking less than you would at home, and treating any vehicle with an enthusiastic driver as the hazard it is.

Calibrating Without Becoming Tedious

None of this argues for fear. It argues for putting fear where it earns its keep.

The traveller who has internalised the base rates is not more anxious than everyone else. They are considerably less so, because they have stopped spending worry on kidnapping and started spending attention on the road, which is a much cheaper transaction and a far better one.

Risk is not the enemy. A trip with no risk in it is a trip you will not remember and probably did not need to take. The objective is not to eliminate the number; it is to know roughly what it is, decide deliberately whether it is worth paying, and then stop thinking about it and go.

That last part is the bit most people forget. Calibration is meant to free you, not to give you a new thing to be careful about.