Cugel wrote:
The US risk-aversion culture?
It's interesting that you find that in cycling. In US woodworking circles the very opposite applies. It's almost a necessary badge of manly bravery to eschew safety guards, devices and procedures in that domain - the amateur woodworking domain at least.
For example, even today, there's a large resistance to the notion of guards over table saw blades; riving knives; sliding carriages (rather than dangerous homemade sliding contraptions). When someone invented a sawstop thingy that stopped the blade rotation instantaneously via detection of a touch of the operator flesh on the blade, there was a huge controversy about how real woodworkers just needed to be experienced to avoid losing a hand or it's fingers and that sawstop was just a money-gouging scheme. Peculiar.
Cugel
The risk aversion culture has the biggest influence when it comes to children, women, and transport choices. But the manly woodworker thing is merely the other side of the same coin.
Independence and personal capability are really important in the USA. Woodworking without guards proves independence and personal capability, as does gun ownership. Riding a bike does, too. Which is one reason it is a minority transport choice, and done by even fewer women than men. This is also why if you are injured or even killed doing it, it's your own damn fault. It's also why children are wrapped in cotton wool. They aren't old & capable enough to make these choices for themselves. If a child get hurt riding their bike, it's the parents' fault.
I've outlined a somewhat extreme take on it, but this sort of thing is the background to many apparently contradictory aspects of American culture.