A careful driver accepts that another person’s mistake can become everybody’s problem.

Care protects you from your own errors and not from anyone else’s. You can drive faultlessly for years and still be caught by somebody’s momentary lapse, which is a hard fact to sit with because it means competence is not the same as safety. What careful people are actually buying is margin: distance, time, the space to respond to a mistake that was never theirs. That is worth having, and it is not a guarantee.

Leave more room than the situation seems to require, on the road and elsewhere. Margin is the only part of another person’s error that you get any say over.