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Comment by ipaddr | Hacker News Reader

Is it, are there any stats to support this? Driving to the airport is different from driving in general where most accidents happen when you are sleepy or close to home. Most deaths occur on two lane highways

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> close to home

This sounds like bad statistics to me.

From Google

> The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has stated that more than 50 percent of all car crashes happen within 25 miles of drivers' homes.

But.. do you not do more than 50% of your driving near your home? This doesn't sound like a meaningful statistic at all.

The majority of accidents happen in the house. That is why one should sleep outside on the pavement ;-)

Define close to home. The other responder noted 25 miles. Having lived in cities most my life, I don't think I have ever lived farther than 25 miles to a major airport. But a quick google search: you have somewhere between about a 1 in a 101 to a 1 in 15,000 lifetime chance of dying in a car wreck in the USA and about a 1 in 11,000,000 to 1 in 821,000,000 for lifetime chance of dying in an airplane crash. Even if you take the best odds for cars and the worst odds for airplanes, it's still multiple orders of magnitude...

flying is not safer than driving- unless you drive 500 miles with 150 other people every time you get in the car- statistics are massaged, and I think risk of accident per journey is better (and is higher in flying)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18439872

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