How much cost would be saved if we settled for the same level of safety as auto travel? Is plane travel just scarier such that two planes went down every week, that people would just stop flying? WHat does that say about the risk assessment abilities of the public? And should the government spend so much in resources to cater to public fears rather than rational policymaking?
And a survey, sort of. If plane travel cost half what it does now but was only as safe as driving a car, would you fly more, less, or avoid planes entirely?
Considering the cost to replace crashed planes, I doubt air travel would be cheaper. And where to you find enough suicidal pilots and flight attendants?
That is a good point though. Airline fleets aren’t that big, if they were losing planes at the rate we lose people to car crashes, their fleets would be depleted pretty quickly.
But what percentage of people traveling around in cars is that? You have to adjust for the percentage of travel (distance) per person. It might work out to a comparable figure.
People are willing to accept the risk of death when driving a car because they believe that it won’t happen to them. So long as they keep their own hands on the wheel, they think that they’re fast enough, smart enough and alert enough to avoid an accident. They’re mostly wrong, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that people are willing to face death if it’s at their own terms.
In a plane, or in a train for that matter, you’re completely at someone else’s mercy. You have absolutely no control over your own fate. For most people, that’s a terrifying prospect, and the only reason they’d be willing to accept it is if the safety standards are much, much higher than they’d be willing to accept if they were the ones in control.
How is “safeness” intended to be expressed, per the OP? And that’s just for starters.
Automobile safeness can be tweaked by fiddling around with collision survivability and and collision prevention. With aircraft, you’re pretty much limited to adjusting prevention.
And what about self-driving cars? The users of those are ceding a portion of personal control over the outcomes of their trips. How large (in perceived percentage) is that portion? And how closely does that map onto the perceived percentage of increased survivability of a bus or train trip?
I wonder if this is just status quo bias. When cars were a new thing, a lot of people actually were terrified of the carnage they caused. I found this out from reading old newspapers. When tens of thousands of people were dying who in the horse and buggy days weren’t dying, it was shocking and tons of people swore they would never get into one of those deathtraps, I’m sticking to my horse thankyouverymuch. But by the 1950s, people were just like, “Yeah, so this Memorial Day Weekend, 1000 people are going to die and it’s no big deal”.
That’s why I suspect that if self driving cars aren’t held to nearly aviation standards of safety, a lot of people will freak out. And some will freak out even then.
But this is one area where I put my foot down. The government should regulate self driving cars vs. people driven cars using cold, hard stats and risk assessment. Killing 10,000 more people per year so that people can “feel” safer and more in control is terrible policy. If self-driving cars kille 20,000 people per year whereas human driven cars kill 30,000, then self-driving cars are awesome! But I’m aware that people will consider that unacceptable carnage.
Yes, I was wondering this. I tend to expect that we will demand an irrationally high safety standard for self-driving cars (and for pilotless aircraft) because of the perceived loss of control.
And that is why self-driving cars will take a lot longer to become accepted than Silicon Valley thinks. I suspect that self-driving cars will become popular in limited circumstances-probably interstate highways and urban driving where speeds are so low that careless (as opposed to stupid) accidents are rarely fatal. For really tough driving like commuting, rural, and suburban driving, it will take a long time.
The OP postulates air travel with “the same level of safety as auto travel”. It seems a very strange leap to suggest this means a number of fatal airline crashes per year equal to the number of fatal auto crashes.
One way to put this into sensible perspective is to note that the number of registered autos in the US is around 264 million. 34,000 fatal crashes a year means around one car in 7,600. This is probably misleading, because the fatal road crash statistic likely includes truck crashes.
If one airliner in 7,600 crashed annually, that would be a total of just under three fatal crashes a year.
An important reason is how much effect the actions and habits of the driver have on the auto accident rate. If you fasten your belts, don’t drink and drive, avoid excessive speed, adjust your driving to weather conditions, etc. your chance of being killed in a car crash can be dramatically lower than the national average.
Yes. adaher’s problem is to assume that the probability of getting into a car crash is the same for all people at all times. The probability of a plane crash is, assuming you stay away from Russian and Malaysian airlines, that is.
Self driving cars make the situation more like the airplane situation than the current car situation, which should improve things a lot.