6 ms·

Measuring the risk of travel in terms of hours seems largely pointless, unless I'm missing something. It equates an hour bus ride with an hour plane ride, whic

Measuring the risk of travel in terms of hours seems largely pointless, unless I'm missing something. It equates an hour bus ride with an hour plane ride, which are not interchangeable, so it makes sense that the associated risks are also not interchangeable. You could account for the additional time it takes to go on a bus to adjust for the longer duration of risk, but at that point it seems like you're just approximating for risk per km.

shock 6y ago
> Measuring the risk of travel in terms of hours seems largely pointless, unless I'm missing something. Again, it depends on what you're trying to measure. If you're trying to quantify the risk of dying by accident at a certain hour, what activity you are doing in that hour is highly relevant. If you are trying to quantify the risk of dying by accident while going from A to B, then it's not (that) relevant.
- chii 6y ago
  > If you're trying to quantify the risk of dying by accident at a certain hour, what activity you are doing in that hour is highly relevant. and this is an irrelevant measure, because by that logic, most people sleep for about 8hrs a day, so the chance they die in their sleep is high!? You measure risk _only_ against what it rewards you. Otherwise, why take the risk at all? Therefore, measuring the risk of air-travel has to be accompanied by a comparison to bus-travel (or rail and/or boat), and measurement should be by distance travelled.
caconym_ 6y ago
I think it makes a lot more sense to look at risk per time, because it's basically the same thing as risk per trip, and that's what I really care about. If you tell me I can fly to Mars in a few days on a brachistochrone torchship and it's safer per mile than any other mode of transport, you may be right, and a few days cooped up in a cramped cabin might be a small price to pay for such an exotic vacation destination, but that risk calculus is really very misleading. The distance involved is so vast that per mile it could be an absurdly low figure by any terrestrial standard while still carrying an absurdly high (by the same standards) risk of death during the trip. In other words, if the odds are e.g. 1 in 10 that the trip will kill me, I don't give a shit how low the risk per mile is.
- apendleton 6y ago
  This seems like a mode of comparison that's disconnected from actual utility. The distance comparison lets me consider a scenario like "I live in Washington, DC. I want to go to New York. I can choose to either get there by plane or car, and I want to know which is safer." This seems like a real, sensible thing to contemplate. The time comparison is "I live in Washington, DC and want to go... to wherever it is that happens to be an hour away from me by whatever mode of transport I happen to be using (so, either New York or someplace outside of Baltimore) and I want to know which is safer"... but I can't for the life of me fathom why the second is a tradeoff anyone would actually be forced to consider. People generally travel with the objective of getting from some specific place to some other specific place.
  - caconym_ 6y ago
    Most people do, in fact, have specific travel time expectations for specific kinds of trips. Going away for a long weekend? Probably you're thinking 1-5 hours, whether you're driving or flying. A week or two? Maybe 5-10 hours. Going to the store? 5-15 minutes. Physical distance doesn't matter at all, because it's abstracted away by the transportation technology. All we care about is cost (time and money), availability of destinations, and risk; and since distance doesn't matter, it really can't be risk per distance that we care about. In practice, no mode of transportation anywhere near as risky per time or per trip as my Mars example is ever going to become mainstream. The point of it is to demonstrate how absurd risk per distance is as a way of getting at a practical and meaningful assessment of travel risk, and we have to go outside of existing mainstream transportation options to see that absurdity because all the existing options must be extremely low risk by any measure or they wouldn't exist. The majority of consumers won't tolerate 1 in 10, 1 in 100, or even 1 in 1000 odds of death per trip.
  - ponker 6y ago
    This assumes that people decide the destination before deciding the mode of transport. In my experience this isn't true, specifically with the 737 MAX. I had a 4-night trip booked with my family to Seattle from San Francisco on a 737 MAX and cancelled it when all that shit went down. Rather than driving that weekend to Seattle we drove to Yosemite because I wasn't going to drive 12 hours to Seattle. In terms of total travel time (time to drive to airport, check in, and fly) the travel time was about the same to Yosemite as to Seattle but the mileage was obviously much less.
ummonk 6y ago
If you're taking trip, you can reduce your likelihood of death by either choosing your transportation to and from the airports or choosing your airplane for the flight itself. Given how bad the crash rate of 737 MAX was, it would be prudent to focus on choice of airplane, rather than choice of grand transportation. The correct comparison isn't "airplane vs. bus" it's "A320 instead of 737 MAX vs. bus instead of car".

shock 6y ago

> Measuring the risk of travel in terms of hours seems largely pointless, unless I'm missing something. Again, it depends on what you're trying to measure. If you're trying to quantify the risk of dying by accident at a certain hour, what activity you are doing in that hour is highly relevant. If you are trying to quantify the risk of dying by accident while going from A to B, then it's not (that) relevant.

chii 6y ago
> If you're trying to quantify the risk of dying by accident at a certain hour, what activity you are doing in that hour is highly relevant. and this is an irrelevant measure, because by that logic, most people sleep for about 8hrs a day, so the chance they die in their sleep is high!? You measure risk _only_ against what it rewards you. Otherwise, why take the risk at all? Therefore, measuring the risk of air-travel has to be accompanied by a comparison to bus-travel (or rail and/or boat), and measurement should be by distance travelled.

caconym_ 6y ago

I think it makes a lot more sense to look at risk per time, because it's basically the same thing as risk per trip, and that's what I really care about. If you tell me I can fly to Mars in a few days on a brachistochrone torchship and it's safer per mile than any other mode of transport, you may be right, and a few days cooped up in a cramped cabin might be a small price to pay for such an exotic vacation destination, but that risk calculus is really very misleading. The distance involved is so vast that per mile it could be an absurdly low figure by any terrestrial standard while still carrying an absurdly high (by the same standards) risk of death during the trip. In other words, if the odds are e.g. 1 in 10 that the trip will kill me, I don't give a shit how low the risk per mile is.

apendleton 6y ago
This seems like a mode of comparison that's disconnected from actual utility. The distance comparison lets me consider a scenario like "I live in Washington, DC. I want to go to New York. I can choose to either get there by plane or car, and I want to know which is safer." This seems like a real, sensible thing to contemplate. The time comparison is "I live in Washington, DC and want to go... to wherever it is that happens to be an hour away from me by whatever mode of transport I happen to be using (so, either New York or someplace outside of Baltimore) and I want to know which is safer"... but I can't for the life of me fathom why the second is a tradeoff anyone would actually be forced to consider. People generally travel with the objective of getting from some specific place to some other specific place.
- caconym_ 6y ago
  Most people do, in fact, have specific travel time expectations for specific kinds of trips. Going away for a long weekend? Probably you're thinking 1-5 hours, whether you're driving or flying. A week or two? Maybe 5-10 hours. Going to the store? 5-15 minutes. Physical distance doesn't matter at all, because it's abstracted away by the transportation technology. All we care about is cost (time and money), availability of destinations, and risk; and since distance doesn't matter, it really can't be risk per distance that we care about. In practice, no mode of transportation anywhere near as risky per time or per trip as my Mars example is ever going to become mainstream. The point of it is to demonstrate how absurd risk per distance is as a way of getting at a practical and meaningful assessment of travel risk, and we have to go outside of existing mainstream transportation options to see that absurdity because all the existing options must be extremely low risk by any measure or they wouldn't exist. The majority of consumers won't tolerate 1 in 10, 1 in 100, or even 1 in 1000 odds of death per trip.
- ponker 6y ago
  This assumes that people decide the destination before deciding the mode of transport. In my experience this isn't true, specifically with the 737 MAX. I had a 4-night trip booked with my family to Seattle from San Francisco on a 737 MAX and cancelled it when all that shit went down. Rather than driving that weekend to Seattle we drove to Yosemite because I wasn't going to drive 12 hours to Seattle. In terms of total travel time (time to drive to airport, check in, and fly) the travel time was about the same to Yosemite as to Seattle but the mileage was obviously much less.

ummonk 6y ago

If you're taking trip, you can reduce your likelihood of death by either choosing your transportation to and from the airports or choosing your airplane for the flight itself. Given how bad the crash rate of 737 MAX was, it would be prudent to focus on choice of airplane, rather than choice of grand transportation. The correct comparison isn't "airplane vs. bus" it's "A320 instead of 737 MAX vs. bus instead of car".