If you're jaywalking across a typically busy street, you don't just start walking without looking both ways, even if you don't see or hear any cars, because a car could come out of nowhere, and you may only have one shot at making that mistake. Same in this case. If you make it, that doesn't mean there wasn't a significant risk.
Let's use this crossing the street example.
If it's a really bad street, we add extra preventive items. Maybe a barrier in the middle of the road, stop both street crossing and provide some traffic safety, double win. Maybe fence. Maybe we clear some sight line obstructions to make it easier to cross. Maybe we add a cross walk. Maybe we change the road configuration to favor pedestrians. We can do preventive measures to discourage crossing or proactive measures to make crossing safer.
Alternatively, we could add plantings to restrict sight lines. We could eliminate other crossings, so this is the only place. Do this at a bend in the road, so the cars and people cannot possibly see each other. Replace all the traffic with electric only cars. Make sure those cars are as silent as possible. Play the Frogger theme over speakers so it's impossible to hear anything.
In the first, we took actions to make crossing the street easier at this location or to shift the location people use. In the second, we took actions to force people to cross at this specific spot while also making it as dangerous as possible.
Before we did either of those actions, there was some risk. After we took the action, we've changed the risk for better or worse. If we use our current trajectory as the baseline risk for a horror movie impact variant, it's relatively low. Like crossing a residential street. The question is, are we taking actions to make it even safer, say adding speed bumps. Or, are we taking actions to make it more dangerous, say changing it to 4 lanes and using it as a high speed detour off the main road.
The concern isn't about the risk as it stands today. It's about if we're taking the actions to keep it that or making poor decisions that have short term desires but long term consequences.
Concern about our actions and how they will change the risk is distinct and different from concern about the risk on it's own.
