8 ms·

We’ve chosen as a society to go all in on aviation safety due to the freakish and scary nature of aviation accidents. Meanwhile the US lags the developed world

We’ve chosen as a society to go all in on aviation safety due to the freakish and scary nature of aviation accidents. Meanwhile the US lags the developed world in road safety. Driving in the US is like a mad max situation. Many unnecessary deaths are preventable. Road deaths are double the OECD average. With high safety investment comes higher costs of flying which pushes more people into driving instead, which kills more people.

ceejayoz 9y ago
Are you arguing for reducing aviation safety, or a massive investment in road safety like places like Sweden have done? I honestly can't tell.
- Brockenstein 9y ago
  Greater road safety. He's saying because of the high cost of aviation safety, more people choose to drive than pay that cost, but driving is statistically much more dangerous. So we should address road safety since so many people are driving...
- cylinder 9y ago
  Greater road safety. Aviation is a rare area where US government has done well regulating for safety. There’s no reason we can’t be as strict with cars. It’s a choice to accept risks.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    > There’s no reason we can’t be as strict with cars. There is. Money and lots of it. "Oh, poor, working class person; you can't afford $5000-6000 per year in exploratory inspections? Well, no car for you then. We really can't be too safe, you know..." As an airplane owner, there's no way in hell the public would stand for the amount of maintenance and inspections given to aircraft for their cars. "Every year, completely remove the interior of the car, pull up the floorboards, lubricate and check tensions on all control cables, check the engine compression and visually inspect the valves, ..." I think my A36 has ~50 hours of mandatory inspections (at $105-125/hr) every 12 calendar months. That's before anything gets fixed (and of course, whatever gets broken during the inspections is also fixed on my dime). I'm not even sure that it particularly contributes to the good safety record, since most of the fatals are pilot-induced (just as most of the fatals on the road are driver-induced).
    - coatmatter 9y ago
      It doesn't need to reach that level of extreme immediately. Just follow what the Dutch did starting all the way back in the late '70s to address their road toll. There are many many places that have far better driver safety records - start by learning from those. A lack of improvement isn't inevitable.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    What do you think the ever-growing set of safety features it is illegal to sell cars in the United States without is for? The idea that nobody cares and nobody tries to enforce safety is quite questionable -- there's simply a lot more driving going on, and not only by highly trained professionals. It's a harder problem.
tnorthcutt 9y ago
I don't know why you're being downvoted, but I agree with you.
mattmaroon 9y ago
Probably because our odds of dying in a car crash are still something like 1/10,000. It's remote enough to not seem real.
- alanh 9y ago
  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/ 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/ 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-overview/odds-of-dying/ http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-ov... If you don’t know anyone killed in a car accident, you are very lucky.
  - amp108 9y ago
    Those statistics are over one's entire lifetime, though, a lifetime full of potential accidents. How do they translate to a per-trip chance?
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    > 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.
    - jopsen 9y ago
      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.
      - 9y ago
danso 9y ago
You don’t think fear of flying contributes to people choosing to drive?
- jcadam 9y ago
  Flying does make me nervous. When the driving time to a destination is less than about 6 hours or so, I seriously consider going by car, even though I know it's more dangerous. At least in a car, I'm in control of the vehicle, and will have something to do in an emergency (try to swerve, pull over, etc.). As a passenger on a plane all I can do is sit and wait for my doom.
  - justherefortart 9y ago
    TSA makes me drive exponentially more than I would otherwise. Dealing with the airport is terrible now. I flew probably 80+ times a year as a consultant in the 90s. My wife would drop me off 30 minutes before my flight (DFW), I'd curb check my bag and walk onto the plane and wait 5-10 so minutes until takeoff. It's hard to deal with the 2+ hours of bullshit security theater now. I forget to take my knives out frequently, have never had them confiscated, but my toothpaste, yeah, that's a threat. Hell, the Lithium Ion batteries are probably the biggest threat, no issues there either.
    - JackFr 9y ago
      > TSA makes me drive exponentially more than I would otherwise. So you're saying that the rate of increased driving due to the TSA is proportional to the total miles you've driven? That is a problem.
    - kbutler 9y ago
      TSA pre-check makes a big difference - almost like flying before, except you get to walk past all those other lines. I didn't want to explicitly support the TSA, so I went with "Global Entry" - same benefits and more, and company paid for it. I have no idea if funds go to TSA or not, but I felt better about it.
mobilefriendly 9y ago
Off-ahoring aircraft maintenance to El Salvador, which Southwest does, is not "going all in" on safety.
- danielahn 9y ago
  Yes - those El Salvadoreans - since they are born with only 3 fingers on each hand, they have a very difficult time using tools that were designed for people with 5 fingers on each hand.
  - zaroth 9y ago
    Or.... “In the last decade, most of the big U.S. airlines have shifted major maintenance work to places like El Salvador, Mexico, and China, where few mechanics are F.A.A. certified and inspections have no teeth.” From a Vanity Fair article linked below.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Ironically, the more US airlines outsource maintenance overseas, the better the US airline safety record has been.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  Can you expand on this? I'm not well-versed in the geopolitics of aircraft maintenance.
  - Harvey-Specter 9y ago
    mobilefriendly is implying that aircraft mechanics in El Salvador are somehow less qualified to maintain Southwest's fleet than (presumably) American aircraft mechanics.
    - zaroth 9y ago
      Probably because they don’t have the same level of professional certification and legal oversight as the FAA ensures for maintenance work performed in the USA.
vondur 9y ago
"Mad Max", where the heck do you live in the US?
- 2RTZZSro 9y ago
  Probably Houston where two thirds of drivers on the road weave in and out of traffic high on coke and drunk, have no insurance, regard for safety of themselves or others, a huge stack of arrest warrants, driving $200 salvage titled cars crumpled body work and partially collapsed frames from their last hit and run with the eternal doctored and expired paper tags and high-beams on at all times. A video of a typical day on the road can be found by searching "wwwy2000 houston"
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
JackFr 9y ago
> Road deaths are double the OECD average. I think you overstate that. Consider fatalities per billion vehicle kilometers -- Americans drive more than the OECD average. The Czech Republic and Korea have rates triple those of the next closest OECD country, and the US fares better than Japan and Belgium. Not only is it not Mad Max, it's basically within the norms of the OECD. https://asset.keepeek-cache.com/medias/domain21/_pdf/media2693/416245-lqadc3lvnp/large/3.jpg https://asset.keepeek-cache.com/medias/domain21/_pdf/media26...
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I've always found being in a car in Korea terrifying, so I'm glad to have statistics to back up my impressions.
- romwell 9y ago
  I've been saying for a while that in the US, the real killer is the suburban infrastructure. Forget guns. Way more people are dying in car crashes than from any other violent cause or accident type. And, as you said, Americans aren't bad drivers per se. It's just that in the US, there are way more miles driven per person than in European countries. This number - and the car fatalities - drop in dense cities like NYC with public transportation that works.
JackFr 9y ago
The difference is that one's own behavior behind the wheel is the primary driver of motor vehicle safety, while one's own behavior typically affects aircraft safety not one bit.
- everdev 9y ago
  Agree with the later part, but with the former, I'm sure in a large percentage of auto fatalities the victim was not at fault. But despite the statistics, I feel safer being in control. It's a funny cognitive bias. I also like the recovery plan for a dangerous driving situation better (swerve or pull over and slow down) because the danger is usually mitigated in seconds. In aviation a dangerous situation can persist for minutes depending on how far away the emergency landing spot is and how high the plane is.
  - greedo 9y ago
    Drunk driving accounts for roughly 25% of the driving fatalities. Not sure how many of that cohort are victims as opposed to the drunks.
    - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      Are we counting drunk pedestrians getting hit by cars as car crash fatalities? Being drunk near heavy equipment drastically increases the chances of said heavy equipment killing you but less so if you've got a bunch of safety systems to save your life when you crash said heavy equipment.
rsync 9y ago
"Driving in the US is like a mad max situation. Many unnecessary deaths are preventable. Road deaths are double the OECD average." All of the recent discussion of road deaths and deaths per million miles, etc., usually have a clarifying post/comment which notes that these figures include motorcycles and commercial trucks ... which skew the numbers dramatically. Does your own day to day (car) driving experience actually seem like a mad max scenario ? Can you compare driving in the United States to, for instance, driving in Guatemala or El Salvador or Vietnam ? I suspect not ...
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Maybe we're ok with our roads being statistically less safe per capita in exchange for a far greater amount of personal freedom of movement per capita?
- coatmatter 9y ago
  I wish to note that it's possible to maximise both safety and freedom at the same time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NUgB_xkIvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NUgB_xkIvU
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    Weather, distance, all the other cons of cycling (groceries, passengers, other large cargo). Yes a bike is better in terms of absolute freedom but only in situations where the trade-offs are tolerable. I can't go pick up a piece of furniture on my bike.
    - coatmatter 9y ago
      > Weather, distance, all the other cons of cycling (groceries, passengers, other large cargo). The same applies for driving, yet somehow the Dutch manage to continue a high participation rate even during bad weather. > Yes a bike is better in terms of absolute freedom but only in situations where the trade-offs are tolerable. We are talking about tradeoffs here - perceived or otherwise. There isn't a perfect scenario, but what systems Netherlands has in place is arguably better. Better freedoms both for riders as well as those who must drive. Perhaps also think of it in terms of gun laws in Australia vs gun laws in America, and measure where the fear lies (are schoolchildren afraid? are parents? or just mostly men?) > I can't go pick up a piece of furniture on my bike. Perhaps. However there are many cases where it can be and is done without a great deal of drama. At worst, you can still use a car even if others have access to alternatives - it's not a total ban we're discussing but rather higher standards before vehicles are deployed. It should be about fairness when it comes to ownership of public space. As it stands in much of the Anglophone world, driver licences are easier to obtain than they are to lose. In fact, it's commonly possible to continue driving the very next day (or hour) after being booked for drink driving. The system is broken, and lessons need to be learnt from not only aviation safety, but from countries that do it better. However, what's somewhat evident is that places such as Silicon Valley would rather reinvent the wheel and solve any social or community problem by selling more software rather than learn from existing best practice. Right now, the system is so imbalanced in favour of private motoring that nobody wins (not even drivers). Suburban sprawl and "might over right" however is a very popular western platform for voters, for now. Driverless cars won't come soon enough compared to the other options that already exist in Netherlands, Sweden and even perhaps Germany.

ceejayoz 9y ago

Are you arguing for reducing aviation safety, or a massive investment in road safety like places like Sweden have done? I honestly can't tell.

Brockenstein 9y ago
Greater road safety. He's saying because of the high cost of aviation safety, more people choose to drive than pay that cost, but driving is statistically much more dangerous. So we should address road safety since so many people are driving...
cylinder 9y ago
Greater road safety. Aviation is a rare area where US government has done well regulating for safety. There’s no reason we can’t be as strict with cars. It’s a choice to accept risks.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  > There’s no reason we can’t be as strict with cars. There is. Money and lots of it. "Oh, poor, working class person; you can't afford $5000-6000 per year in exploratory inspections? Well, no car for you then. We really can't be too safe, you know..." As an airplane owner, there's no way in hell the public would stand for the amount of maintenance and inspections given to aircraft for their cars. "Every year, completely remove the interior of the car, pull up the floorboards, lubricate and check tensions on all control cables, check the engine compression and visually inspect the valves, ..." I think my A36 has ~50 hours of mandatory inspections (at $105-125/hr) every 12 calendar months. That's before anything gets fixed (and of course, whatever gets broken during the inspections is also fixed on my dime). I'm not even sure that it particularly contributes to the good safety record, since most of the fatals are pilot-induced (just as most of the fatals on the road are driver-induced).
  - coatmatter 9y ago
    It doesn't need to reach that level of extreme immediately. Just follow what the Dutch did starting all the way back in the late '70s to address their road toll. There are many many places that have far better driver safety records - start by learning from those. A lack of improvement isn't inevitable.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  What do you think the ever-growing set of safety features it is illegal to sell cars in the United States without is for? The idea that nobody cares and nobody tries to enforce safety is quite questionable -- there's simply a lot more driving going on, and not only by highly trained professionals. It's a harder problem.

tnorthcutt 9y ago

I don't know why you're being downvoted, but I agree with you.

mattmaroon 9y ago

Probably because our odds of dying in a car crash are still something like 1/10,000. It's remote enough to not seem real.

alanh 9y ago
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/ 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/ 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-overview/odds-of-dying/ http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-ov... If you don’t know anyone killed in a car accident, you are very lucky.
- amp108 9y ago
  Those statistics are over one's entire lifetime, though, a lifetime full of potential accidents. How do they translate to a per-trip chance?
- Alex3917 9y ago
  > 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.
  - jopsen 9y ago
    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.
    - 9y ago

danso 9y ago

You don’t think fear of flying contributes to people choosing to drive?

jcadam 9y ago
Flying does make me nervous. When the driving time to a destination is less than about 6 hours or so, I seriously consider going by car, even though I know it's more dangerous. At least in a car, I'm in control of the vehicle, and will have something to do in an emergency (try to swerve, pull over, etc.). As a passenger on a plane all I can do is sit and wait for my doom.
- justherefortart 9y ago
  TSA makes me drive exponentially more than I would otherwise. Dealing with the airport is terrible now. I flew probably 80+ times a year as a consultant in the 90s. My wife would drop me off 30 minutes before my flight (DFW), I'd curb check my bag and walk onto the plane and wait 5-10 so minutes until takeoff. It's hard to deal with the 2+ hours of bullshit security theater now. I forget to take my knives out frequently, have never had them confiscated, but my toothpaste, yeah, that's a threat. Hell, the Lithium Ion batteries are probably the biggest threat, no issues there either.
  - JackFr 9y ago
    > TSA makes me drive exponentially more than I would otherwise. So you're saying that the rate of increased driving due to the TSA is proportional to the total miles you've driven? That is a problem.
  - kbutler 9y ago
    TSA pre-check makes a big difference - almost like flying before, except you get to walk past all those other lines. I didn't want to explicitly support the TSA, so I went with "Global Entry" - same benefits and more, and company paid for it. I have no idea if funds go to TSA or not, but I felt better about it.

mobilefriendly 9y ago

Off-ahoring aircraft maintenance to El Salvador, which Southwest does, is not "going all in" on safety.

danielahn 9y ago
Yes - those El Salvadoreans - since they are born with only 3 fingers on each hand, they have a very difficult time using tools that were designed for people with 5 fingers on each hand.
- zaroth 9y ago
  Or.... “In the last decade, most of the big U.S. airlines have shifted major maintenance work to places like El Salvador, Mexico, and China, where few mechanics are F.A.A. certified and inspections have no teeth.” From a Vanity Fair article linked below.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Ironically, the more US airlines outsource maintenance overseas, the better the US airline safety record has been.
rainbowmverse 9y ago
Can you expand on this? I'm not well-versed in the geopolitics of aircraft maintenance.
- Harvey-Specter 9y ago
  mobilefriendly is implying that aircraft mechanics in El Salvador are somehow less qualified to maintain Southwest's fleet than (presumably) American aircraft mechanics.
  - zaroth 9y ago
    Probably because they don’t have the same level of professional certification and legal oversight as the FAA ensures for maintenance work performed in the USA.

vondur 9y ago

"Mad Max", where the heck do you live in the US?

2RTZZSro 9y ago
Probably Houston where two thirds of drivers on the road weave in and out of traffic high on coke and drunk, have no insurance, regard for safety of themselves or others, a huge stack of arrest warrants, driving $200 salvage titled cars crumpled body work and partially collapsed frames from their last hit and run with the eternal doctored and expired paper tags and high-beams on at all times. A video of a typical day on the road can be found by searching "wwwy2000 houston"
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

JackFr 9y ago

> Road deaths are double the OECD average. I think you overstate that. Consider fatalities per billion vehicle kilometers -- Americans drive more than the OECD average. The Czech Republic and Korea have rates triple those of the next closest OECD country, and the US fares better than Japan and Belgium. Not only is it not Mad Max, it's basically within the norms of the OECD. https://asset.keepeek-cache.com/medias/domain21/_pdf/media2693/416245-lqadc3lvnp/large/3.jpg https://asset.keepeek-cache.com/medias/domain21/_pdf/media26...

emodendroket 9y ago
I've always found being in a car in Korea terrifying, so I'm glad to have statistics to back up my impressions.
romwell 9y ago
I've been saying for a while that in the US, the real killer is the suburban infrastructure. Forget guns. Way more people are dying in car crashes than from any other violent cause or accident type. And, as you said, Americans aren't bad drivers per se. It's just that in the US, there are way more miles driven per person than in European countries. This number - and the car fatalities - drop in dense cities like NYC with public transportation that works.

JackFr 9y ago

The difference is that one's own behavior behind the wheel is the primary driver of motor vehicle safety, while one's own behavior typically affects aircraft safety not one bit.

everdev 9y ago
Agree with the later part, but with the former, I'm sure in a large percentage of auto fatalities the victim was not at fault. But despite the statistics, I feel safer being in control. It's a funny cognitive bias. I also like the recovery plan for a dangerous driving situation better (swerve or pull over and slow down) because the danger is usually mitigated in seconds. In aviation a dangerous situation can persist for minutes depending on how far away the emergency landing spot is and how high the plane is.
- greedo 9y ago
  Drunk driving accounts for roughly 25% of the driving fatalities. Not sure how many of that cohort are victims as opposed to the drunks.
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    Are we counting drunk pedestrians getting hit by cars as car crash fatalities? Being drunk near heavy equipment drastically increases the chances of said heavy equipment killing you but less so if you've got a bunch of safety systems to save your life when you crash said heavy equipment.

rsync 9y ago

"Driving in the US is like a mad max situation. Many unnecessary deaths are preventable. Road deaths are double the OECD average." All of the recent discussion of road deaths and deaths per million miles, etc., usually have a clarifying post/comment which notes that these figures include motorcycles and commercial trucks ... which skew the numbers dramatically. Does your own day to day (car) driving experience actually seem like a mad max scenario ? Can you compare driving in the United States to, for instance, driving in Guatemala or El Salvador or Vietnam ? I suspect not ...

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

Maybe we're ok with our roads being statistically less safe per capita in exchange for a far greater amount of personal freedom of movement per capita?

coatmatter 9y ago
I wish to note that it's possible to maximise both safety and freedom at the same time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NUgB_xkIvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NUgB_xkIvU
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  Weather, distance, all the other cons of cycling (groceries, passengers, other large cargo). Yes a bike is better in terms of absolute freedom but only in situations where the trade-offs are tolerable. I can't go pick up a piece of furniture on my bike.
  - coatmatter 9y ago
    > Weather, distance, all the other cons of cycling (groceries, passengers, other large cargo). The same applies for driving, yet somehow the Dutch manage to continue a high participation rate even during bad weather. > Yes a bike is better in terms of absolute freedom but only in situations where the trade-offs are tolerable. We are talking about tradeoffs here - perceived or otherwise. There isn't a perfect scenario, but what systems Netherlands has in place is arguably better. Better freedoms both for riders as well as those who must drive. Perhaps also think of it in terms of gun laws in Australia vs gun laws in America, and measure where the fear lies (are schoolchildren afraid? are parents? or just mostly men?) > I can't go pick up a piece of furniture on my bike. Perhaps. However there are many cases where it can be and is done without a great deal of drama. At worst, you can still use a car even if others have access to alternatives - it's not a total ban we're discussing but rather higher standards before vehicles are deployed. It should be about fairness when it comes to ownership of public space. As it stands in much of the Anglophone world, driver licences are easier to obtain than they are to lose. In fact, it's commonly possible to continue driving the very next day (or hour) after being booked for drink driving. The system is broken, and lessons need to be learnt from not only aviation safety, but from countries that do it better. However, what's somewhat evident is that places such as Silicon Valley would rather reinvent the wheel and solve any social or community problem by selling more software rather than learn from existing best practice. Right now, the system is so imbalanced in favour of private motoring that nobody wins (not even drivers). Suburban sprawl and "might over right" however is a very popular western platform for voters, for now. Driverless cars won't come soon enough compared to the other options that already exist in Netherlands, Sweden and even perhaps Germany.