4 ms·

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

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.
- deleted 6y ago
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tsimionescu 6y ago
I think there are actually two modes of deciding this, and the two different calculations make sense for each mode. Sometimes you need to be in a specific city - say, a work trip, or public event, or life event etc. Then, the question you want to ask is "which vehicle will take me there in the safest manner", and plane will likely win (assuming large distance). Other times, you are deciding on a vacation destination. Here you often have a more-or-less fixed time budget, but a flexible destination, and the question can become "what is the safest trip I can take that will last between, say, 5-10h?" ( I could get to NY by plane, or to Vienna by train, or to the Golden Sands by car in roughly that time). In this case, trains and other mass transports besides planes may well win out in safety.
gorgoiler 6y ago
People travel to places because it is tractable to get there in a reasonable amount of time. In the 17th century, I would walk to my local knife sharpener. In the 21st century, I can take a train to Soho to visit a superior specialist. Both trips take a few hours via two different modes of transport. The fact that one covers more distance is immaterial. They are comparable by the fact they can both be completed in an afternoon. (Ironically, our modern era provides a third option: cycle to the local specialist. Cycling with a bag full of knives — even blunt ones — is way too risky.)

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.

deleted 6y ago
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tsimionescu 6y ago

I think there are actually two modes of deciding this, and the two different calculations make sense for each mode. Sometimes you need to be in a specific city - say, a work trip, or public event, or life event etc. Then, the question you want to ask is "which vehicle will take me there in the safest manner", and plane will likely win (assuming large distance). Other times, you are deciding on a vacation destination. Here you often have a more-or-less fixed time budget, but a flexible destination, and the question can become "what is the safest trip I can take that will last between, say, 5-10h?" ( I could get to NY by plane, or to Vienna by train, or to the Golden Sands by car in roughly that time). In this case, trains and other mass transports besides planes may well win out in safety.

gorgoiler 6y ago

People travel to places because it is tractable to get there in a reasonable amount of time. In the 17th century, I would walk to my local knife sharpener. In the 21st century, I can take a train to Soho to visit a superior specialist. Both trips take a few hours via two different modes of transport. The fact that one covers more distance is immaterial. They are comparable by the fact they can both be completed in an afternoon. (Ironically, our modern era provides a third option: cycle to the local specialist. Cycling with a bag full of knives — even blunt ones — is way too risky.)