I personally can't make myself feel better about driving with active epilepsy by thinking other conditions or habits cause more accidents. It's enough for me that active epilepsy
can cause accidents. There is no level of risk I am willing to take with other people's lives and well-being, even if others take greater risks at the wheel. Just because certain actions are supposedly more likely to cause accidents than seizures do, doesn't make driving with uncontrolled epilepsy morally acceptable to me. That thinking falls under the same category as thinking that there are better and worse ways of stealing, or committing fraud, and that some of those ways are morally acceptable. I'm of the sort who thinks that even if I steal a dollar from someone, it's unacceptable.
When I look at the trials some are citing, they don't offer objective data. Looking at how many accidents are currently caused by seizures is not an objective study for two reasons:
a) people with uncontrolled epilepsy are already legally barred from driving so of course there are fewer accidents caused by seizures.
b) when we rely on legal reporting of how accidents went down, it is unlikely that epilepsy sufferers are going to be honest about whether or not they had a seizure. Their licences would be taken away and they might be held accountable for the damage they have caused.
There are more objective studies, one showing that as many as a quarter of epilepsy sufferers have had car accidents as a result of seizures. None of those were due to tonic clonic seizures--all were partials, which puts paid to the excuse that 'I can drive because I don't have tonic clonics.'
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1762211
"(1) Fifty-seven percent were caused by complex partial seizure without an aura in which consciousness was immediately impaired at onset, while about 10% were attributed to simple partial seizure in which the conscious state was not altered. No accident was caused by a first seizure; (2) Fifty-one percent occurred on an empty road with little pedestrian and/or vehicular traffic; (3) In about half the accidents, the driver's vehicle collided against an immovable object, and only 20% involved crashing into another car; (4) Most accidents caused damage to only the driver's car and/or mild physical injury; and (5) Fifty-four percent of the accidents were not reported to the police, and many that were reported were ascribed to driving while asleep, to careless driving or to similar behavior."
The issue is this:
"adherence to a 12-month seizure-free interval was estimated to prevent about 80% of all crashes associated with seizures, but it also would prohibit driving for about 50% of all those with epilepsy who would not crash. "
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2673400/
If not driving for 12 months cuts my chance of a crash that could hurt of kill someone by 80%, I don't think catching the train is much of a burden to pay, comparatively speaking.