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Comment by roncesvalles | Hacker News Reader

But the stakes are much higher.

On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey.

So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.

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Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft.

Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1]

So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that.

[0] https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm

[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...

All I'm saying is: if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, the drive to the airport wasn't more dangerous than your flight on the plane.

This is intuitive and obvious and yet is somehow beaten out of us by "quick facts" that we accept blindly touting commercial aviation as some kind of miracle. It's still a miracle but not quite to the degree that people believe. Hurtling through the sky at 0.8 Mach in a metal tube will always be more dangerous than rolling down a highway in a metal cage at 70 mph.

None of the people who responded to me yet have refuted this.

> Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles.

Which is vanishingly small.

It means the average driver can expect to be a fatality in an automobile accident once ever one to two hundred years or more.

If you drive a fairly typical 12.5K miles per year, it will take you 8000 years to drive 100M miles.

“Or more” technically includes a factor of 20-80x, but I think you were way low.

Thanks. Sloppy work.

I’m half an Australia away from my usual internet-rant tooling, and I find multi-tab cross referencing on mobile pretty unenjoyable.

From https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/

> In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles.

Planes travel about 10x-20x faster than cars, but that’s still 0.06 vs 0.57. Seems like quite a difference. Which numbers are you using?

Is the purpose of travel to go from one place to another or to spend time?

If it’s to go from one place to another, referencing statistics to per-mile seems to make more sense and, to me, it’s in no way “cheating because planes travel so fast”.

But your choice of destination changes because air travel is available to you. You wouldn't go to a destination thousands of miles away, as often, if it weren't possible to fly there.

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