Excess Automobile Deaths as a Result of 9/11
schneier.com
schneier.com
"Inconvenience" is putting it mildly. Even before my recent experiences with airport security[0], I preferred to drive or take the train for short distances (NYC to Boston, Philly, DC, etc.). As one can imagine, that aversion has only increased.
Nate Silver puts this well:
> According to the Cornell study, roughly 130 inconvenienced travelers died every three months as a result of additional traffic fatalities brought on by substituting ground transit for air transit. That’s the equivalent of four fully-loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year.[1]
Emphasis mine.
[0] Previously submitted to HN, but for the lazy: http://varnull.adityamukerjee.net/post/59021412512/dont-fly-... [1]http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/the-hidd...)
As a tall person, a plane has always been uncomfortable for me. Add to that experience the long security lines and being treated like cattle... nah. It costs me more, but I'll drive.
I'd probably seriously consider commuting weekly or biweekly from central WA to SFBA, even if it took 20h. 10h would be nothing, as I could just sleep.
I have a feeling that as time goes on, this will be seen as more and more of a handicap instead of a minor inconvenience.
'The present study showed that ginger at a dose of 1,000 mg effectively reduced the severity of nausea evoked by circular vection, prolonging latency before the onset of nausea and shortening the recovery time from nausea after the cessation of vection.'
Effects of ginger on motion sickness and gastric slow-wave dysrhythmias induced by circular vection Han-Chung Lien , Wei Ming Sun , Yen-Hsueh Chen , Hyerang Kim , William Hasler , Chung Owyang American Journal of Physiology - Gastrointestinal and Liver PhysiologyPublished 1 March 2003
I hope I am right for your sake (or that you never have to change your method of transportation of I am wrong!) My comment was meant optimistically with respect to your human ability to adapt to something new.
I hope you understand my "gall" extends to speculation on an Internet forum only; I would certainly not want to subject you to such sensations in real life.
Presumably you've tried medication? It would probably be horrible to have to take transdermal scopolamine fairly continually, though.
I think that is normal, at least I was the same way. For me it was bad enough that I would avoid eating anything at all for a day before any long road-trip.
My unsubstantiated hypothesis is that car-sickness stops being a major issue around the time that you grow large enough to effectively see out of the car. Buses are still unpleasant, though not vomit inducing, to me. That might be attributable to the poor visibility on buses (however I have no problem with planes at all...).
I'm aware that motion sickness can change as people grow up. But given that I'm in my 40s, the odds of "growing out of it" are rather dim.
If that's correct, then maybe some sort of visual indicator that lets you know when to expect a few minutes or more of relatively straight travelling (such as on a highway), and an indicator when this is about to end, would be helpful?
But having been through it before, I have no desire to experiment with the limits of what makes me sick. Doubly so since I tend to not notice that I'm getting sick until I'm going to be sick for quite a bit...
Motion sickness is mostly caused by your brain trying to resolve opposing signals between your eyes and your sense of motion. If you're looking at a non-moving scene like a screen in the car, but everything else in your body says you're moving at 60 MPH, you might get motion sickness.
A gimbal-mounted seat would change how often you bumped around, but your vestibular system would still sense things like going up/down a hill or making a turn.
Basically, a gimbal-mounted seat would be about as effective as a perfectly paved road.
I'd still rather be in a private car and just pull over whenever I want to use a bathroom, or get food, etc. I wouldn't feel particularly comfortable sleeping (particularly with my luggage) on a public bus in the US.
I'd also pay extra to have a machine drive me from SF-SEA rather than a human driver, as I'm somewhat antisocial and dislike being around random people like taxi drivers in car-sized spaces for that long.
Treated like cattle is exactly the right way of putting it. I would rather be inconvenienced on my terms.
Cattle probably have more legal protections than travelers in a U.S. airport.
Ha.
He refused (mostly to spare her the cost I think) while pointing out that would have been a good way to increase the chances of him dying while traveling.
If you can choose to drive instead of to fly, however...
Terrorism is not really about deaths; there are many greater causes of preventable death, as you note. It's about attacking a nation's perception of safety. You can ignore another random car accident or drug-related murder, but it's much harder to ignore 9/11.
I'd much prefer the vaccine to the "cure": to educate ourselves on this tactic and refuse to play along, treating terrorism the way we would treat a natural disaster. But alas, there's too much money and power to be gained in the security theater racket, and power abhors a vacuum.
Another good illustration: In the past 20 years total, deer have killed more on American soil (~150-200/yr) than terrorists. So where is the trillion dollar War on Bambi?
Also, there is a war on deer, but we prefer to call it "hunting." Hunting regulations are designed to cull the deer population, particularly in areas where natural predators were killed off by humans long ago. Hunting regulations balance the need to keep the deer population down with the need to not drive deer into extinction. It might make sense to bump up the number of kills allowed per hunter per season or to make the seasons longer if automobile hits are a serious enough problem (there are still more deer now in many eastern states than there were when the colonies were first established).
If I had accelerated all at once, the jerk would have broken my neck.
Quantity/time has a quality all of its own.
You may not ever earn or own that much money, but perhaps one of your descendants might be the next Gates/Buffet/Rausing/Musk (pick your favourite rich person).
If you are yet to breed, or having bred, yet to finish your job of raising that child, then you might want to include the potential financial loss that your descendants incur by not living up to their full potential, or taking an extra generation to climb above your current social level.
You mention a financial loss to "the economy", rather than explicitly to the household of the deceased. You may not earn $6.5M for yourself, but you might implement some feature that saves 1000 people who earn $65K each a year of effort.
Your employer may need to replace you, we often see posts about how important it is to hire the right people, because of how much the hiring process itself costs.
If a well-liked individual dies, then the productivity of some of those close to them drops for a period. Your next of kin may have to take time out of work to arrange the disposal of your remains, attend an inquest, deal with probate, authorise the withdrawal of life support from your brain-dead body (and deal with the psychological trauma that that might cause). Your friends and relatives may take a day off work to attend a funeral.
If blame is to be apportioned for someone's death, expensive legal professionals will be involved in working out how much blame should fall on whom. Insurers will argue about how quickly their liability should be discharged, and how much they should actually pay.
This old line has been exaggerated because people make a fallacious comparison. Ask whether people feel safer driving or flying, and many will say driving - this may still be statistically wrong, but it is intuitively based on the correct comparison.
The comparison people intuitively make is "events I can't control in each alternative", while the fallacious-debunkers compare total casualties. But almost all of the plane casualties are beyond the traveler's control, while on the other hand he/she can make sure the car is in good condition, drive while alert, obey speed limits and so on. The plane casualty number may still be lower than the corrected car casualty number, but not nearly by as much as is sometimes claimed.
Statistics isn't a feeling, and the comparison is correct in that, on average, air travel is significantly safer than car travel. One should note, however, that the "on average" is the key bit, as one might argue that drivers in accidents have some special characteristic at work making them more susceptible than most, but claiming that Schneier or his source is making a false comparison somehow is simply unfair and untrue. Moreover, plenty of fatal auto accidents are not the explicit fault of those that die (drunk driver, someone else texting while driving, semi-trucker not paying attn). So "feeling safe" is worth nothing when you're staring down the grim reaper in the grill of the semi that switched lanes without signalling to pass without seeing you.
Sometimes it's unavoidable - you're stopped at a light and someone crosses the median to plow into you. In that situation, you are screwed.
But often, there is something you as the not "at fault" party could have done to avoid the collision (even with the drunk driver), had you been paying attention enough to see the situation. Change lanes. Slow down. Speed up. Leave more room. Leave less room. Always, no matter what, be looking.
Once I prevented myself from getting rear-ended at a traffic light: I was stopped and saw someone coming up behind me way too fast. I leaned on my horn, they clued in, and braked in time to stop just touching my fender. (I was in a motorcyle at a time, so REALLY happy with the outcome.)
Again, sometimes it really is unavoidable - but in a surprising number of situations there are actions a driver can take to avoid or reduce the severity of the incident.
Insurance companies understand this - that's why your rates raise when you get in an accident, regardless of whether you're legally "at fault".
Driving well and alertly doesn't end at the bounds of legal fault. Sure if you were rear-ended someone else will pay damages - but if you're in a wheelchair or dead, that money isn't going to make things better.
So to GP's point: there are a LOT of things that are far more under your control when you're driving. Falling out of the sky... not so much.
I've had people tell me "I don't even remember the last 60 seconds" after inducing a spin in a vehicle. It's a scary thought.
I doubt that even the best driver can get safer than an airliner. It's going to be hard to measure. For one, it's almost impossible to measure the risk of a "safe" driver compared to an unsafe one. For another, it's almost impossible to measure the risk of American airline travel today, because fatalities are so rare that it's no longer possible to turn them into a meaningful number. That last part suggests to me that even the safest driver will be far more at risk on the road than in a plane.
I've been rear-ended multiple times. None of the drivers that hit me were drunk or intoxicated. I still had no control over their actions. Short of not driving at all there was no action I could have taken that would have prevented me from being hit. I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time (e.g., I had been fully stopped for about 60 seconds at a stoplight, not in rush hour traffic, when the light turned green and I was almost instantly hit from the rear. I was about 16 cars back from green light, and there was no way I could have been rolling. But, the driver behind me saw the light turn green and decided that traffic would be moving before he reached my location.)
Dig up statistics about traffic fatalities, and see how many of them were caused by someone else. Here you can see that one third of casualties are not even drivers: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1105.p...
Comparing total casualties is very deceptive, since cars rack up many more passenger miles than airliners. Still, cars kill lots of people and car safety is a high-value goal.
Once we get self-driving cars that are significantly better at avoiding accidents and mitigating severity of accidents, this all will change in very significant ways. It will certainly result in many more people avoiding the TSA.
There is another interesting way of thinking about this. They might be more inclined to use air travel than road because the 'element of control' is lost from them in both modes of travel. So they would then compare the time it takes to reach the destination and since air travel is faster, they might even end up sucking up the TSA pat-downs.
Once self driving cars come, airlines will rediscover service and make 80% of their customers pre-checked or they will lose half their business.
In many cases over land, they'll find that an autonomous car will be faster.
It would be just as "unfair" to compare driving against crop-dust pilots, which seem to more frequently end up in a crash.
That intuition is somewhat wrong, depending on how you define 'crash'. http://www.ntsb.gov/doclib/safetystudies/SR0101.pdf table 2, shows 53,487 passengers involved in accidents, with 2,280 fatalities. Table 3 limits that to more serious accidents. There, of 2,739 passengers, 1,215 died, over half due to impact wounds.
Yes, a jet nosediving into hard rock will kill everybody on board, but one making a very rough 'landing' near first aid units? Not something to volunteer for, but not certain death, either.
We chose not to plump for the TSA groping squad. Neither should the US.
One must keep the public mood in the back of one's head - this was in 1977, there was a series of attacks by the Red Army Faction, which everyone had thought was dead, and then, just as now, there was the discussion about dragnet surveillance and civil liberties, there was even discussion about the aims of the RAF, perhaps they even had a point.
The keyword is "Deutscher Herbst".
In my opinion the balance is completely lost.
Contrast it with: chances are that if we equipped every passenger airline with a mandatory ER that we would save a few lives. And yet, we don't do this because the economics and the logistics are simply not worth it. (I can't prove that one either way).
Ditto the TSA.
The question is: why did nothing like this ever made the national news? There has been the odd instance of someone bringing a knife on an airplane, and that was about it. There have also been several FBI-led entrapments and leadings-on of wannabe terrorists, who could never have caused any damage even if they had wanted to.
What we haven't seen is the TSA preventing an airplance hijacking. My best guess is that these things are rare to begin with, and if there were any plots it was the police that got on top of them, not the TSA ballsack grabbers.
I am curious as to why you think that's the case, though. The linked article estimates roughly 500 additional deaths per year. It's hard to know what proportion of those to assign to the TSA versus fear of terrorism, of course. But for any reasonable proportion, I think, I just don't see how it works. The TSA would have to be saving hundreds of lives a year for it to be a net gain. In a hypothetical non-TSA world, there'd have to be a couple of terrorist attacks killing everyone on board an airliner each year, or a 9/11-scale attack every few years.
There's no reason, as far as I know, to think that the TSA has prevented anything of the sort. The main reasons for the relative lack of terrorist activity on American airlines in the past decade and change are:
1. Terrorist organizations just aren't that well funded and organized. 9/11 was pretty much a one-off event for them, costing relatively huge amounts of manpower and money.
2. Cockpit doors are reinforced and kept locked, making it hard to take over an airplane.
3. Passengers now know that a hijacking likely means that they will die, so any would-be hijacker is presented with dozens if not hundreds of people who suddenly have nothing left to lose. 9/11 counted on passengers thinking that they would survive the event if they remained docile, and now that this attitude is gone, hijackings are no longer really possible.
I've not seen any evidence that the TSA has stopped any terrorist attacks during its existence, let alone enough to account for hundreds of lives each year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...
Maybe car turnover (switching to safer cars) acts stronger than flawed government policy.
Throwing away our freedom to prevent rare, statistically insignificant events is equally stupid. By doing so we are risking a much greater danger -- the chronic danger of a corrupt and possibly deadly police state.
If either of the towers had fallen sooner or had fallen sideways instead of collapsing almost completely vertically, then it could have been much worse.
I'm trying to make the narrowest possible point when saying this: just that ~3K casualties was far from the worst case outcome that was possible that day.
EDIT: per my reply below, I'm only trying to make the discussion as honest as possible. At the core is the question, "Given X casualties to air travel based terror attacks, is a particular security policy worth implementing if it leads to Y casualties indirectly?". I'm addressing a shortcoming in what I see as the figure being used for X, since it's a small data set. It would be interesting to address the effectiveness (% of attacks thwarted or discouraged) of the security policy, too.
Speculating as to what could have happened makes no sense. The number who died is what it is, for better or worse.
As it stands 9/11 is actually a worse terrorist attack than can ever be achieved with the use of airplanes again, see Flight 93. So it doesn't make sense to consider these sorts of hypotheticals when talking about changing air security policy.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing
Anyway, as to why I didn't address non-air terrorism: I didn't set the scope of the discussion, I'm just participating in it. Sadly I'm well aware of the '93 bombing, the Bali bombings, the African embassy bombings... all sorts of non-aircraft attacks.
I literally said in my post that I was trying to make the "narrowest possible point". I meant it.