A friend of mine is afraid of flying. He asked me once why I’m not afraid. I told him that every time I board a plane I am accepting the fact that it is possible I might crash and die. He was horrified, but I brought up that driving 80 mph on the highway is the same trade-off, and the difference is just that one allows the illusion of control.
He’s still afraid of flying, but now he’s afraid of driving, too
Good job improving the rationality of your friend! Now tell him he’s about as likely to die of the flu as he is of a car accident. Then he can have another fear. Either he’ll turn into a house-bound agoraphobe or he’ll realize nothing has changed since before he started worrying about these things.
Respect to both you and your friend for being logically consistent just at different risk thresholds.
However, I will add that it’s not certain whether the risk level of driving is equal for good or bad drivers. It’s not exactly an illusion of control. You really do have more control. If it were somehow possible to reliably separate people who died in a car into groups of people that were driving responsibly versus not driving responsibly, I don’t know if that would look as dangerous as an airplane or not… But it seems fair to estimate that it wouldn’t be.
Airplanes are so much safer than cars, it’s not even close. Cars are certainly more dangerous regardless of the driver, even if the safest drivers had 10x fewer deaths than average. (which is probably unrealistic, because even if you drive perfectly at 25mph, you can still be killed by some idiot going 100)
Transport safety is measured in macro scale by how many deaths/injuries/incidents/etc. per person-km travelled. For example, if there’s 100 people on a plane that travels 1000km, then 100 people travelled 1000km, so that one flight is 100,000 person-kilometers. If one person drives a car 1000km, then that’s just 1000 person-km.
Planes are in the range 0.07 incidents per billion person-km. Cars are 3.7 per billion. Motorcycles are over 100.
Only in America, where motorcycles are a toy people with too much money and issues with their self-image buy to play with on weekends, 1/3 of which involve drinking, a significant number not wearing helmets, and are mostly dipshits who drive off the road taking a corner incorrectly. It’s much safer in the rest of the world.
Motorcycles also generally only carry 1-2 people, so the person-km to vehicle-km ratio is closer to 1 compared to other forms of transportation. They’re also unstable, small and tend to be operated even more carelessly than cars.
Something is off with your statistic. Can you provide a source?
Planes being only ~50x safer per passenger mile doesn’t sound right. Is that including all planes? General aviation is far more dangerous than commercial aviation, which might skew the statistic
Per passenger mile commercial aviation should be at least 100x safer than cars, I would think
I used to think that, too. But lately, I’ve started to consider that even more people are even worse drivers than I thought. And I think that really changes things.
Also, that common airplane statistic about deaths is usually reported in terms of passenger miles, which I think is a little misleading since airplanes intrinsically travel many more miles. It would be more meaningful to measure deaths per trip or better yet deaths per passenger hour rather than miles. However, I did find some lawyer websites saying that the lifetime odds of dying in a plane crash are around 1 in 800,000,000 versus 1 in 95 for cars.
Now I know it seems deranged on the face of it, but hear me out.
For driving to be as safe as flying, we would need someone to be about 8500 times less likely to die over the course of their life driving. Most people drive 5 days a week, for about 50 years, so 13000 days driving. So:
The odds of surviving a day of safe driving= S
Odds of surviving a day of dangerous driving= D
8500=S^13000 / D^13000 = (S/D)^13000
S/D = 8500^(1/13000) = 1.0007
So if driving safer on day made you even 0.07% more likely to survive that day, then that gives us that 8500x increase over a lifetime.
Now…I know this is based on that 1/95 which ALREADY includes the safe drivers. So the legitimacy of this estimate depends on how many drivers you think are safe. This is why my estimate of that ratio caused me to change my mind. I feel like only around 15% of people drive at that level of safety. So, of course, in some sense this still means that driving in general is more dangerous because you have an 85% chance of being one of the people for whom it is more dangerous. But I still think there’s something to be said for the minority of truly cautious and defensive drivers.
Acknowledging other failure points here, most airplane deaths are in private aviation, so that may make the bar harder to clear again. But I think the whole 13000 days estimate demonstrates how even tiny improvements there can easily account for large changes, too.
Aviation is safe because every accident gets thoroughly investigated and precipates changes to equipment and/or procedures to lessen the risk of it happening again. After decades of this, we’ve ironed out most of the common problems.
Meanwhile, car accidents are met with a shrug. We continue to build bad traffic patterns, rely on outdated ‘common sense’ speed enforcement, fail to enforce real licensing standards, loose body shape regulations etc. etc. Basically the only thing we DO do for cars - making them safer in the event of a crash is one thing we absolutely do not do for airplanes.
No amount of good driving can safe you against someone driving the wrong way without lights in the night on the highway, or people running red lights while you make a turn. Air travel has the innate advantage of three dimensional mobility and the drivers being under a lot more scrutiny, giving everyone a lot more space to keep distance from one another compared to roads. Also, airplanes are being inspected and repaired a lot more consequently than the average car or truck.
Also, the majority of drivers say that they are above average drivers, which tells you how well adjusted the view of driving skills is in general.
I don’t think you understand just how big of a difference it is. Flying on a plane is one of the most regulated things ever, and despite crashes getting tons of media attention actully dying on a commercial flight is so rare that you are basically in no more danger on a plane than you are just sitting on a random bench in the park.
To put this in perspective in the year 2023 72 people died worldwide from aviation accidents.
In that same year 40k people died in the US alone from car accidents.
To put it further into perspective more people die on planes from random health events that just happened to occur while they were on a plane, like a cardiac event, than they do from actual plane related accidents.
When you’re going down a highway at 70 mph and relying on everyone else to navigate traffic with you following the same rules, written and unwritten, it sure as hell is an illusion of control.
I’ll cede that you’re correct you as an individual do have more control over the vehicle you’re in. However, you’re still at the whims of the simulation we live in - physics doesn’t just stop and the unpredictable nature of other drivers makes it impossible to have total control over the situation.
Even driving alone on a road there are animals that could jump out, or a pothole or debris etc etc. That’s like the maximum control you can have and even then it’s not absolute.
I think, unfortunately, it will take widespread adoption of self-driving cars to reduce accident fatalities much further from where they are now. But that’s not likely to happen for many years on, cars and horses were hanging out together on roads for a long time afaik - feel free to correct me.
Anyways I get your point , and anecdotally I’m sure we all have had moments driving where we thought “if I wasn’t driving the car would have gotten into an accident” so yeah I’d say we all have that same feeling.
The majority of people involved in automobile collisions are not at fault. Yes, “good” drivers (who still make mistakes on account of fragile carbon bodies) have less risk, but we’re talking a fraction of a fraction here.
True but what really matters in this case is how often the people who weren’t at fault die, and how often the people who were at fault die. I haven’t seen as clear of data on that
A friend of mine is afraid of flying. He asked me once why I’m not afraid. I told him that every time I board a plane I am accepting the fact that it is possible I might crash and die. He was horrified, but I brought up that driving 80 mph on the highway is the same trade-off, and the difference is just that one allows the illusion of control.
He’s still afraid of flying, but now he’s afraid of driving, too
Good job improving the rationality of your friend! Now tell him he’s about as likely to die of the flu as he is of a car accident. Then he can have another fear. Either he’ll turn into a house-bound agoraphobe or he’ll realize nothing has changed since before he started worrying about these things.
Driving is many times more dangerous than flying commercially
Don’t tell him that he could just keel over dead at any moment from an embolism or something.
Respect to both you and your friend for being logically consistent just at different risk thresholds.
However, I will add that it’s not certain whether the risk level of driving is equal for good or bad drivers. It’s not exactly an illusion of control. You really do have more control. If it were somehow possible to reliably separate people who died in a car into groups of people that were driving responsibly versus not driving responsibly, I don’t know if that would look as dangerous as an airplane or not… But it seems fair to estimate that it wouldn’t be.
Airplanes are so much safer than cars, it’s not even close. Cars are certainly more dangerous regardless of the driver, even if the safest drivers had 10x fewer deaths than average. (which is probably unrealistic, because even if you drive perfectly at 25mph, you can still be killed by some idiot going 100)
Transport safety is measured in macro scale by how many deaths/injuries/incidents/etc. per person-km travelled. For example, if there’s 100 people on a plane that travels 1000km, then 100 people travelled 1000km, so that one flight is 100,000 person-kilometers. If one person drives a car 1000km, then that’s just 1000 person-km.
Planes are in the range 0.07 incidents per billion person-km. Cars are 3.7 per billion. Motorcycles are over 100.
Only in America, where motorcycles are a toy people with too much money and issues with their self-image buy to play with on weekends, 1/3 of which involve drinking, a significant number not wearing helmets, and are mostly dipshits who drive off the road taking a corner incorrectly. It’s much safer in the rest of the world.
Motorcycles are more dangerous than I thought! Would have thought a factor of 4 maybe.
They’re still safer (at least for certain kinds of injury) than horses, so if your young daughter wants a pony, get her a racing bike instead.
Motorcycles also generally only carry 1-2 people, so the person-km to vehicle-km ratio is closer to 1 compared to other forms of transportation. They’re also unstable, small and tend to be operated even more carelessly than cars.
Something is off with your statistic. Can you provide a source?
Planes being only ~50x safer per passenger mile doesn’t sound right. Is that including all planes? General aviation is far more dangerous than commercial aviation, which might skew the statistic
Per passenger mile commercial aviation should be at least 100x safer than cars, I would think
I used to think that, too. But lately, I’ve started to consider that even more people are even worse drivers than I thought. And I think that really changes things.
Also, that common airplane statistic about deaths is usually reported in terms of passenger miles, which I think is a little misleading since airplanes intrinsically travel many more miles. It would be more meaningful to measure deaths per trip or better yet deaths per passenger hour rather than miles. However, I did find some lawyer websites saying that the lifetime odds of dying in a plane crash are around 1 in 800,000,000 versus 1 in 95 for cars.
Now I know it seems deranged on the face of it, but hear me out.
For driving to be as safe as flying, we would need someone to be about 8500 times less likely to die over the course of their life driving. Most people drive 5 days a week, for about 50 years, so 13000 days driving. So:
The odds of surviving a day of safe driving= S
Odds of surviving a day of dangerous driving= D
8500=S^13000 / D^13000 = (S/D)^13000
S/D = 8500^(1/13000) = 1.0007
So if driving safer on day made you even 0.07% more likely to survive that day, then that gives us that 8500x increase over a lifetime.
Now…I know this is based on that 1/95 which ALREADY includes the safe drivers. So the legitimacy of this estimate depends on how many drivers you think are safe. This is why my estimate of that ratio caused me to change my mind. I feel like only around 15% of people drive at that level of safety. So, of course, in some sense this still means that driving in general is more dangerous because you have an 85% chance of being one of the people for whom it is more dangerous. But I still think there’s something to be said for the minority of truly cautious and defensive drivers.
Acknowledging other failure points here, most airplane deaths are in private aviation, so that may make the bar harder to clear again. But I think the whole 13000 days estimate demonstrates how even tiny improvements there can easily account for large changes, too.
Aviation is safe because every accident gets thoroughly investigated and precipates changes to equipment and/or procedures to lessen the risk of it happening again. After decades of this, we’ve ironed out most of the common problems.
Meanwhile, car accidents are met with a shrug. We continue to build bad traffic patterns, rely on outdated ‘common sense’ speed enforcement, fail to enforce real licensing standards, loose body shape regulations etc. etc. Basically the only thing we DO do for cars - making them safer in the event of a crash is one thing we absolutely do not do for airplanes.
No amount of good driving can safe you against someone driving the wrong way without lights in the night on the highway, or people running red lights while you make a turn. Air travel has the innate advantage of three dimensional mobility and the drivers being under a lot more scrutiny, giving everyone a lot more space to keep distance from one another compared to roads. Also, airplanes are being inspected and repaired a lot more consequently than the average car or truck.
Also, the majority of drivers say that they are above average drivers, which tells you how well adjusted the view of driving skills is in general.
I don’t think you understand just how big of a difference it is. Flying on a plane is one of the most regulated things ever, and despite crashes getting tons of media attention actully dying on a commercial flight is so rare that you are basically in no more danger on a plane than you are just sitting on a random bench in the park.
To put this in perspective in the year 2023 72 people died worldwide from aviation accidents.
In that same year 40k people died in the US alone from car accidents.
To put it further into perspective more people die on planes from random health events that just happened to occur while they were on a plane, like a cardiac event, than they do from actual plane related accidents.
When you’re going down a highway at 70 mph and relying on everyone else to navigate traffic with you following the same rules, written and unwritten, it sure as hell is an illusion of control.
I’ll cede that you’re correct you as an individual do have more control over the vehicle you’re in. However, you’re still at the whims of the simulation we live in - physics doesn’t just stop and the unpredictable nature of other drivers makes it impossible to have total control over the situation.
Even driving alone on a road there are animals that could jump out, or a pothole or debris etc etc. That’s like the maximum control you can have and even then it’s not absolute.
I think, unfortunately, it will take widespread adoption of self-driving cars to reduce accident fatalities much further from where they are now. But that’s not likely to happen for many years on, cars and horses were hanging out together on roads for a long time afaik - feel free to correct me.
Anyways I get your point , and anecdotally I’m sure we all have had moments driving where we thought “if I wasn’t driving the car would have gotten into an accident” so yeah I’d say we all have that same feeling.
They’re not being logically consistent. Being afraid of flying, but okay with driving is inherently irrational. Driving is far more dangerous
The best driver in the world is at far more risk than the average commercial jet
It’s an incredible difference in safety. Cars are not safe
my mother has been backed into while in traffic by two different handy busses in two different towns 3 years apart
both cars totaled
The majority of people involved in automobile collisions are not at fault. Yes, “good” drivers (who still make mistakes on account of fragile carbon bodies) have less risk, but we’re talking a fraction of a fraction here.
True but what really matters in this case is how often the people who weren’t at fault die, and how often the people who were at fault die. I haven’t seen as clear of data on that
Air France 447 is why I hate flying and has everything to do with control.
Damn you really made it worse lol