I'm refusing to fly the MAX, period! The plane is flawed by design...
It's not so much MCAS, electric trim, this, or that.
The bigger issue is it's too complicated, has too many features, and the FAA can't adequately oversee testing and certification all the way down the engineering stack. Furthermore, because of pressures to save a buck, Boeing is willing to cut corners and sacrifice safety by slapping a plane together without properly engineering or testing it. Because of this behavior, it's difficult to know how many other problems are lurking around like in the 787.
737 classics are simpler and reliable.
The NG's randomly have hidden structural weaknesses exposed during runway overruns and hard landings when the fuselage breaks up because of Ducommun and Boeing negligence.
The MAX is a steaming pile that may be a white elephant around Boeing's neck.
The 787 is notoriously-bad.
The 777 is pretty good.
Airbus has had much more automation for years. Are they dropping out of the sky? Maybe they manage their complexity better than Boeing, who hires underpaid engineers to work on things that they're really not qualified to do.
Deaths from car accidents per 100 million miles driven: 1.33
Deaths from plane accidents per 100 million miles by plane: 0.0077
(Note above statistics are from the US)
In your example, California to New York would be approx 3k miles while point Reyes is approx 150-300 miles depending on where you start. A 10-20x longer journey via plane is still an order of magnitude safer.
Per mile, the car is about 200x more dangerous - in fact the usual statistic is that getting on a plane is safer than driving to the airport, not doing the whole distance in the car.
People who fly in planes are generally not flying from every conceivable location on the globe to every other one in an even distribution and randomly using every type of plane available on every carrier. Neither are those driving cars driving from every possible destination to every other in every kind of vehicle etc.
Compare someone exclusively flying back and forth between one wealthy first world country to another on a Dreamliner run vs someone driving an 80's Ford Pinto regularly across treacherous mountain passes in the Andes.
Or the converse (use your imagination).
An important and useful statistic is that one particular, new model of aircraft is tremendously crashy considering the amount of time it's been in service.
It makes sense to avoid travelling on that aircraft, until it can be proven to have a flight-miles/crash ratio more in line with other models. (Which may take a number of years, or decades, especially if people are avoiding it...)
> Don't know if deaths includes pedestrian or bikes killed by cars, could be irrelevant if you only compare your odds to be alive after journey.
I agree this could be debated, but I don't think it's too useful to say "The journey was safer because rather than kill the person travelling it only killed a random pedestrian".