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Comment by alanh | Hacker News Reader

One in 10k? Nonsense.

> Your odds of dying in a car crash, over the span of your entire life, are somewhere in between 1 and 50 and 1 and 100. — http://www.asktheodds.com/death/car-crash-odds/

> Chance of dying in transportation accidents (mostly motor vehicles): 12 per 10k per year — https://www.livescience.com/

> Lifetime odds of death by motor vehicle crash, United States, 2016: 1 in 102 — http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-ov...

If you don’t know anyone killed in a car accident, you are very lucky.

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> Lifetime odds of death by motor vehicle crash, United States, 2016: 1 in 102

If you only drive sober, always wear a seatbelt, and only drive cars with the highest NHTSA ratings then your lifetime chances are probably more like 1 in 300, if not less.

That said, your chances of getting seriously injured in a car crash are significantly greater than that.

Or move to a Scandinavia where the crash rate is ~30% of the US, measured by population (which is probably the measure these stats use).

Don't apply stats like this to yourself, use them to guide policy instead.

Why would you measure by population? Shouldn't it be by distance driven?

Otherwise cities like NYC would have a really low rate since so many people don't have cars.

For this subject matter per capita (should really be per licensed driver to account for different rates of public transit usage between populations but per capita is close) is appropriate because people care about the likelihood of something over a lifetime.

Miles driven would be useful too but not as directly useful in evaluating odds of any one random person dying in a car crash.

Regardless, I'm be interested in seeing the stats broken down by accident type (which is tracked by the police and insurance companies to some extent).

My suspicion is that there's several accident modes that are more common in North America that make up most of the difference.

I also suspect that just like pretty much ever other thing that's common at scale but statistically unlikely at the individual level socioeconomic status is the best predictor.

Well that depends. If what I care about is not dying then going twice as far but still dying isn't an improvement.

Measure the thing you actually care about. After issuing metal helmets to infantry in WW1 the number of men hospitalised with head injuries climbed enormously. Were helmets a bad idea? Nope. To get hospitalised first you need to survive your injuries.

The fact that most of us on Manhattan don't own cars unfortunately does not mean that we walk through tree lined streets empty of large, heavy and dangerously driven motor vehicles.

If a high-winnings lottery had these odds, I'd be playing every month. As far as roads go though, I choose to minimise my exposure to nearly all motorists by avoiding most roads altogether (this is possible to do in many places, but I concede not all places).

No - because those numbers are pulled from the actual driving population(where people drive drunk, sometimes don't wear a seatbelt, and drive in cars ranging built over 40+ years with a wide range of safety standards. To do better than 1 in 102 means you only need to behavior better than the population average, not perform perfectly at all times.

Those statistics are over one's entire lifetime, though, a lifetime full of potential accidents. How do they translate to a per-trip chance?

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