Australian I'm ashamed to say.
Been a lurker for a while (was a member years ago, used to run Ozcoaster with Ian 'Rabid' Disney). Saw this on the local news (Canberra) and thought this would be the best place to get some reliable information. Although it was refreshing to read the excellent article that has been posted several times, the vast majority of coverage including that animation has been lazy and implicitly sensationalizing the event and the danger or coasters in general, by not putting their overall safety into context for readers.
As others have pointed out many times already, although it's difficult to calculate deaths or serious injuries per passenger mile, an educated guess based on trip numbers (which show them to be extremely safe compared to others forms of transport) would demonstrate that roller coasters are statistically safer forms of transport than at least all forms of road transport and I would be surprised if it didn't come out on top against commercial rail and air travel as well, regardless of which calculation method is used. The reason for this is fairly obvious - these are highly engineered forms of transport, with redundant safety systems and comfortable margins in terms of loads on the track, train and structure and even more importantly, are operating within an extremely controlled and predictable environment that just isn't possible for practical modes of transport (but also the reason for trains and planes being safer than road travel, for example).
In my opinion, the main reason such rare events as this one generate such inappropriate or disproportionate responses compared to much more pressing realities of the dangers of road travel (or countless other more likely things to kill you, such as what you've had for lunch for the last 20 years), is that roller coasters not only look scary and dangerous, they are designed to elicit these emotions. The media absolutely have a responsibility to do a far better job than they do when it comes to deliberately sensationalizing such events without putting the overall safety of roller coasters and amusements park rides into context for readers, the vast majority of which aren't coaster enthusiasts and don't know the numbers and realities regarding safety. Despite what we'd all like to believe, we rarely use logic alone in a decision making process and the less we know (or think we know), they more we rely on an emotional or associative judgement - neither of which ends well for the perception of roller coaster safety after even a minor incident.
Even though there is a parallel to incidents involving commercial air travel, as others have mentioned, I think that the reality of the overall safety of air travel has been hammered home long and hard enough by the airlines (and subsequently the media to a lesser extent), so that even after high profile incidents, most people would still acknowledge commercial air travel as being safer than driving.
I have a strong suspicion that if you were to conduct a poll the day after the SFOT tragedy and the day after the recent tragedy at SFO, with a question along the lines of "in light of yesterday's incident, how likely are you to reconsider your next 'plane trip'/'roller coaster ride'?" You would receive a far more negative reaction in terms of future intent towards the coaster than the plane - both of which, fortunately, fade over time.
Having said all that, as much as I love coasters and theme parks, there are far more important issues I would like to see covered in a much more responsible manner by the media.
