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I think those numbers are old, as you can tell from the "excludes terrorism" qualifier. If you look at, say, the last decade, terrorism doesn't make any differe
by mikeash 7y ago
I think those numbers are old, as you can tell from the "excludes terrorism" qualifier. If you look at, say, the last decade, terrorism doesn't make any difference. This isn't entirely arbitrary: air travel has gotten a lot safer lately.
Doing the math using the data from https://www.bts.gov/content/transportation-fatalities-mode https://www.bts.gov/content/transportation-fatalities-mode and https://www.bts.gov/content/us-passenger-miles https://www.bts.gov/content/us-passenger-miles, I come up with 6,059 billion airline passenger-miles for the decade ending in 2017 (the last year provided there) and 66 fatalities, for a rate of about 0.01 per billion passenger miles.
In the same period, railroads did about 176 billion passenger miles with 94 fatalities, for a rate of about 0.53. Buses did 3,234 billion passenger miles with 486 fatalities, for a rate of 0.15.
The numbers vary in other countries, but I suspect they tend to vary in the same direction and in a similar amount.
- mercutio2 7y agoYour numbers look sound. But to make a not especially important but still interesting pedantic point: There’s an argument that instead of passenger-miles, most people’s intuitive sense of transportation danger is actually based on passenger-hours, not passenger-miles, which makes buses and trains look better. But I completely agree with your fundamental point that air travel is incredibly safe!
- mikeash 7y agoI’m not sure if I care about people’s intuition on this. Measuring by hour is plainly stupid. If people really do evaluate it that way, it’s an interesting bit of psychology, but irrelevant to actual safety.
- mercutio2 7y agoHmm. I wouldn’t quite go as far as stupid. The argument is that humans, in the aggregate, don’t choose trips exclusively based on passenger miles; they (often, though not always) think about how many hours they’re willing to devote to travel. If cheap air travel availability as a mode induces people to travel 10x more passenger miles, in a world where airlines were only as safe per passenger mile as cars, there would be a net reduction in public health. But we don’t live in that world; planes are better in safety when measuring by passenger hour than cars, so in fact we’ve improved public health.
- gdy 7y agoYou seem to be including deaths of non-passengers in case of buses and trains. If you correct for that, buses and trains are still safer.
- mikeash 7y agoI don't think so for buses. The line I used is labeled "Bus occupants." The train data is less clear. It's described as "Train accidents" so it could potentially be more general, but grade crossings and trespassers are separated out, which seems to imply that "Train accidents" is occupants.