...the gap between the expert view of risk and public perceptions of it.
Brief Discussion of some tosser's book (hope that doesn't count as an attack
What you ask is impossible Gunna, there is no real way to rigidly quantify the risks. Learned boffins (and passing amateur f'wits) have examined the data on collision rates in the US & Oz, and drawn the conclusion that there would be no decrease in safety to implement the US system. Reasonable enuf I suppose, but we are comparing a system where airliners bang into lighties with one where they haven't.
Other learned boffins (and now-entrenched f'wits) have drawn up lists of what we can't actually implement from the US (radar coverage, sectors the size of house blocks, hundreds of VOR, crews & ATC that grew up with the system and understand it, loads of regional/secondary airports, lots of towers) and have decided these aren't important. This is an assumption, can't be proven, either way.
As the system is implemented and people try things previously thought unsafe and nothing happens, or bad things happen or overactive imaginations sweat or even rational thinking about the possibilities occurs when they look at their bedroom's ceiling at night; everybody involved then extrapolates the risks in their head. Sadly, they're not qualified to do it. Not the ATC, not the pilots, (or the f'wits,) they are reacting to their percieved risk. The aforementioned boffins supposedly understand it, but (personally) I don't believe they do.
The percieved risk to an airline CEO who's golden parachute depends on a high share price threatened by the possibility of a clang dropping aluminium on an orphanage is different to that of a charter operator sending an old, expendable aeroplane out with a kid at the controls who pays for the privilege of flying it.
Tis a leap into the unknown. Even a clang or two in the next few years may not prove anything either way.