I haven’t said a thing about skill level: I’m talking about objective known risk factors–seatbelts and sobriety being the most obvious ones. And driving is not playing at a casino, where the whole point is to have a bunch of truly random unrelated events. Being sober and buckling your seat belt (along with driving during the day, not driving a motorcycle, not being a teenage boy, having good airbags, avoiding rural highways, etc) have a tremendous impact.
If one’s risk of fatality all evens out in the slurry of statistics, why do insurance companies pay actuaries so much to estimate relative risk, and adjust premiums accordingly?
I am not saying that this means car travel is safer than air travel. But I do think that both are generally very safe–in air travel, the danger is negligible, and in vehicle travel, it is almost negligible. If you are a conservative driver–if you wear your fucking seat belt and only drive sober–I strongly suspect that this moves the danger of car travel even further towards negligible.
Are you seriously suggesting that the correlation between seat belt use and fatalities in car accidents is spurious as best and that further research is needed before we can draw any conclusions?
It’s not clear from your cite exactly what the numbers mean: 1 in 5000 what? It also still includes people that are drunk (close to 20% of fatalities) and people on motorcycles(35x more likely to die). So I’d double it again, to 1 in 40,000. Still nowhere near as safe as flying, but, as I said before, close enough to negligible that it seems irrelevant.
It’s like the thing where having a foreskin increases your risk of penile cancer 800% or something. But that moves the odds from 1 in 100,000 to 8 in 100,000, so it’s really not meaningful. I’m making the argument that with reasonable, objective safety precautions driving gets much, much safer, arguably into the range that opting to fly–potentially paying a lot more to fly–because it is safer is pretty meaningless.
1 in 100,000 and 1 in 12,500 is a pretty big difference.
It’s **not **arguably in the range. Not anywhere even close. We all believe that you are the safest driver in the world. It’s still not as safe as flying.
So deaths in alcohol impaired crashes are not quite as high as you might think.
When you go to a casino, you can choose games with the best odds. You can play games like blackjack following optimal strategies, and not hitting when you feel like it. That can improve your odds - but you are still going to lose.
Though I’m reasonably sure that no Dopers now posting have been victims of a fatal crash, I bet lots of people have been involved in bad crashes despite doing everything right.
Again, this isn’t about me and my magic driving skills. It’s about a handful of objective risk factors that make a huge difference in how dangerous driving is.
I never said and I never meant to imply that driving was in the same range as flying. What I said was that safe practices could put the danger of driving into the range of negligible.
Do you feel like people who opt to drive instead of fly are engaging in seriously risky behavior? It’s not that driving is safer than flying, it’s that safe driving and flying are both safe enough that the relative safety is not a factor in my decision whether to drive or fly.
Dangerous driving–driving without those safety precautions–is dangerous enough that it would be a factor in my decision.
I’m making the smallest possible point here.
I already cited that page. 20% of fatalities, and in 80% of the cases, the fatality is the impaired driver or a passenger in his car. That’s significant.
In no way am I suggesting I’m immune to a fatal car accident. But you seem to be suggesting that it’s an inevitable as losing all your money in a casino. Do you really feel like driving is that risky?
Carbon brakes. These work very well once they get warmed up but when they are cold they are relatively ineffective. What happens is after you land you push on the brakes and nothing happens, you push more and still nothing happens, you push some more and the brakes suddenly grab as they’ve got up to a reasonable temperature. This can be avoided with a bit of finesse, basically holding pressure on the brakes and just waiting for them to bite a bit then modulating them.
Lack of familiarity with the brakes. In many airlines the Captain takes care of all taxiing, only handing over to the FO at the beginning of the take-off roll and taking the controls back near the end of the landing roll. This means the FOs don’t get nearly as much feel for the brakes as the Captain and may be a bit harsh with them, particularly when combined with the carbon brake issue above. Additionally, the Captain, although they get more practice with the brakes, is still only using them a few times each flight.
Related to number 2. After landing, when the Captain takes over near the end of the landing roll there can be a change in the amount of braking applied as control is transferred. It may also be the case that the FO was not applying enough brakes to get off the assigned taxiway so when the Captain takes over they have to jump on them a bit.
Auto-brakes. I don’t have experience with them but most airliners have auto-brakes. It’s possible that you are feeling the change from auto to manual braking.
All in all, airliner brakes aren’t like brakes on your car. They don’t have a lot of feel, there is a separate brake for each foot (one on each rudder pedal), and you only use them with serious intent once per flight. You don’t get the constant practice with them the way you do with a car but you have to make absolutely sure that you get stopped before the end of the runway.
Compared to flying, yes, it’s significantly riskier. This is a matter of statistics; even controlling for the factors that you cite the risk from driving is still dramatically worse than the risk from commercial air travel.
You’re also looking only at fatalities. There were 2,443,000 automobile related injuries in 2015, and 6,264,000 reported accidents. Fatalities went up slightly in 2015 but the numbers have been trending downward over the past few decades. Fatalities aren’t the only measure of safety and adding in injury numbers makes airplane travel look even safer.
I said that the data you provided doesn’t prove that seat belts have a causal relationship to car accident fatalities. To be as clear as possible, I didn’t say no such link exists, only that the data you provided doesn’t prove it.
In fact I suspect that excellent research has been done and the causal link has been established. But that’s not the data you presented.
If you add up all the dangers you’ll face walking from Independence Missouri to Portland Oregon, I’m pretty sure walking is much more dangerous than driving. And that’s even with modern treatments for dysentery.
Okay, we’re saying the same thing - most people who die in crashes die in crashes where alcohol is not involved.
Actually I’m surprised by the high number for those in the car with the impaired driver dying. Availability again - more coverage for the cases where those in other cars get killed.
No, just pointing out that even playing the best games is not as rewarding as playing an almost zero-loss game - not playing in a casino, flying in the other case.
Back when airbags were just coming into use, I saw some claims that they would increase the accident rate because they would encourage riskier behavior. I don’t recall any supporting evidence, and given the decrease in fatalities it doesn’t seem very likely, but it was out there.
Probably from car companies resisting extra cost for safety features.
I’m an actuary. There’s a lot of data publicly available from FARS, the fatal accident reporting system, which has data on nearly every auto fatality in the US. But from the top of my head:
Stop referencing motorcycles. Their accident rate is reported separately. That’s not part of the statistics on car safety.
As for your other factors, yes, you are probably safer than average. The median driver is much safer than the mean driver. No one is enormously safer than average, but a few drivers are enormously less safe than average. That is, the top 1% of drivers aren’t much safer than the 70th percentile, but then the risk goes up. Last I looked, the 80/20 rule was true. The worst 20% account for about 80% of losses. (That was liability dollars, not fatalities. Since good drivers get hit by bad drivers, the risk of death is probably a little less skewed than the risk of causing liability. But you could get data on seat best use and alcohol use from FARS.)
Taking all that into account, yeah, there’s no way you can overcome that 750 factor. You, and anyone else traveling long distances, are safer on a plane.
You’re even safer hour per hour, which I think does matter. When people decide where to vacation, they take into account the time to get there more than the miles traveled.
First, it is obvious that commercial airline travel in the US ranks safer than driving, overall on average. Thousands of people die in car accidents every year but for years at a time nobody dies in airliner crashes. It’s hard to believe that the obviously very common act of flying is enough rarer than driving to compensate for that huge difference in absolute death toll. And any study of the stats show it’s not.
But, this case is still illustrative of the pitfalls of using average statistics, especially to compare uniform things with very non-uniform things. Airline travel’s very high degree of safety is in fact related to the imposition of uniform high standards in every aspect of flight operations. Driving is the polar opposite of that, and even the safety of cars themselves varies considerably.
Interstate v other roads is one distinction, but there are many others (time of day, season/weather, type of car) even besides the big one: ‘the nut that holds the wheel’. And as was pointed out subsequently, the big issue with driver skill is really bad drivers not whether a driver is above average or not. Although really bad drivers are also to a degree an uncontrollable factor from the POV of good drivers.
But just to illustrate one of the other skews, the IIHS’s stats for fatality rate by car model show several luxury models with no fatalities in a three year period (which is obviously influenced also by typical drivers of particular models, but here we’re not trying to separate those). Again, in a ranking of flying v driving, flying is safer. But if trying to quantify an actually relevant ratio of safety it’s much trickier. For example say multi-decade but not old driver with virtually perfect record, very safe car model, highway driving in springtime conditions in daylight only, IOW a near transcontinental trip my wife and I are about to embark on. It’s not as safe as flying, but general stats of driving safety are not very relevant to quantifying how much. And it’s doubtful if that risk is worth worrying about say compared to sudden death from illness (where ever you are) other accident, etc. Some posts have extrapolated from the flying/driving ranking to implying driving is necessarily a non-negligible risk, but that’s not clear, depending.
I heard that a bit back in the day as well. People would talk poorly of BMW drivers, and say that they got the safe car because they were an unsafe driver.
I have no idea if that is true at all, however… I do know some peopel that bought their teenage kids expensive cars with advanced safety features specifically to protect them from their higher likelihood of being in an accident. That could skew things a bit.
