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Less safe does not mean unsafe. Marginal gains in safety after a certain threshold may not be worth it. People wear helmets on bicycles, but no one wears a helmet just walking around.

Several years ago I read a German interview with a construction engineer who complained about the industrial lobby that pushes more and more regulations that, incidentally (/sarc), increase a (forced) demand for their products.

He gave several examples, of which I remember one. It is now law in Germany that new homes with French windows must have extra strong glass in them. The reason? What if a toddler on a tricycle ran into the glass and suffered serious injuries or death?

Now, said the engineer, there are no cases in Germany of this actually ever happening, or at least we do not have any records of them. But this what-if theoretical scenario increases construction costs of new German homes by a thousand euro or so. (And increases a basically guaranteed demand for products of a few certified safety glass vendors A LOT!) Take forty or fifty such extra requirements together and their cumulative effect on price of the finished home starts being significant.

But no one wants to be known as a potential child killer, so it is not worth opposing such measures.

The level of safety gained by such measures is nevertheless dubious. People didn't die in homes built to the less stringent standards of 1990 like flies.




Yeah, just to be clear, I was specifically talking about land-use regulations. I don't know anything about how stringent material requirements are for building houses, but i'd wager we have some dumb ones on the books in the US.


> People wear helmets on bicycles, but no one wears a helmet just walking around.

When you start off with a false equivalence...




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