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Road traffic kills over a million people every year, many of them due to various technical and design flaws. People just tolerate those deaths far better than d

Road traffic kills over a million people every year, many of them due to various technical and design flaws. People just tolerate those deaths far better than deaths from plane crashes.

jacquesm 5y ago
If the MAX had continued to fly without getting to the root cause it would have been a completely different story than the one that we have today, which is bad enough as it is with both Boeing and the FAA owning what they broke.
sofixa 5y ago
Because road traffic deaths are rarely in the hundreds range per event due to preventable criminal negligence. When a bridge collapses and tens of people die, nobody tolerates it.
dereg 5y ago
You’re making a misleading comparison. If you want to liken the 737 MAX’s failures to road traffic, you have to ask yourself if there’d be broad acceptance of shoddily built, fault-intolerant bridges and freeways. Moreover, would that acceptance be greater or lesser if the public knew that engineers believed their designs were flawed?
- salawat 5y ago
  Or say, a fleet of supposedly self-driving capable vehicles mayhaps?
whakim 5y ago
I think this has much more to do with the fact that people drive cars and not airplanes. Most people have confidence in themselves and not others (cf. George Carlin's joke: "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"). So they're happy to make things safer if those changes only affect other people (as in an airplane). But when it comes to the fixes that would do the most to reduce traffic fatalities (e.g., lower speed limits on non-highways, more speed cameras, or perhaps most pertinently technology in cars that would make it more difficult to speed, etc.), those affect you too.
- spdionis 5y ago
  This is a common response, but people are usually fairly comfortable with trains and busses.

Road traffic kills over a million people every year, many of them due to various technical and design flaws. People just tolerate those deaths far better than deaths from plane crashes.

jacquesm 5y ago

If the MAX had continued to fly without getting to the root cause it would have been a completely different story than the one that we have today, which is bad enough as it is with both Boeing and the FAA owning what they broke.

sofixa 5y ago

Because road traffic deaths are rarely in the hundreds range per event due to preventable criminal negligence. When a bridge collapses and tens of people die, nobody tolerates it.

dereg 5y ago

You’re making a misleading comparison. If you want to liken the 737 MAX’s failures to road traffic, you have to ask yourself if there’d be broad acceptance of shoddily built, fault-intolerant bridges and freeways. Moreover, would that acceptance be greater or lesser if the public knew that engineers believed their designs were flawed?

salawat 5y ago
Or say, a fleet of supposedly self-driving capable vehicles mayhaps?

whakim 5y ago

I think this has much more to do with the fact that people drive cars and not airplanes. Most people have confidence in themselves and not others (cf. George Carlin's joke: "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"). So they're happy to make things safer if those changes only affect other people (as in an airplane). But when it comes to the fixes that would do the most to reduce traffic fatalities (e.g., lower speed limits on non-highways, more speed cameras, or perhaps most pertinently technology in cars that would make it more difficult to speed, etc.), those affect you too.

spdionis 5y ago
This is a common response, but people are usually fairly comfortable with trains and busses.