Transport safety is measured in macro scale by how many deaths/injuries/incidents/etc. per person-km travelled. For example, if there's 100 people on a plane that travels 1000km, then 100 people travelled 1000km, so that one flight is 100,000 person-kilometers. If one person drives a car 1000km, then that's just 1000 person-km.

Planes are in the range 0.07 incidents per billion person-km. Cars are 3.7 per billion. Motorcycles are over 100.

Aviation is safe because every accident gets thoroughly investigated and precipates changes to equipment and/or procedures to lessen the risk of it happening again. After decades of this, we've ironed out most of the common problems.

Meanwhile, car accidents are met with a shrug. We continue to build bad traffic patterns, rely on outdated 'common sense' speed enforcement, fail to enforce real licensing standards, loose body shape regulations etc. etc. Basically the only thing we DO do for cars - making them safer in the event of a crash is one thing we absolutely do not do for airplanes.

I used to think that, too. But lately, I've started to consider that even more people are even worse drivers than I thought. And I think that really changes things.

Also, that common airplane statistic about deaths is usually reported in terms of passenger miles, which I think is a little misleading since airplanes intrinsically travel many more miles. It would be more meaningful to measure deaths per trip or better yet deaths per passenger hour rather than miles. However, I did find some lawyer websites saying that the lifetime odds of dying in a plane crash are around 1 in 800,000,000 versus 1 in 95 for cars.

Now I know it seems deranged on the face of it, but hear me out.

For driving to be as safe as flying, we would need someone to be about 8500 times less likely to die over the course of their life driving. Most people drive 5 days a week, for about 50 years, so 13000 days driving. So:

The odds of surviving a day of safe driving= S

Odds of surviving a day of dangerous driving= D

8500=S^13000 / D^13000 = (S/D)^13000

S/D = 8500^(1/13000) = 1.0007

So if driving safer on day made you even 0.07% more likely to survive that day, then that gives us that 8500x increase over a lifetime.

Now....I know this is based on that 1/95 which ALREADY includes the safe drivers. So the legitimacy of this estimate depends on how many drivers you think are safe. This is why my estimate of that ratio caused me to change my mind. I feel like only around 15% of people drive at that level of safety. So, of course, in some sense this still means that driving in general is more dangerous because you have an 85% chance of being one of the people for whom it is more dangerous. But I still think there's something to be said for the minority of truly cautious and defensive drivers.

Acknowledging other failure points here, most airplane deaths are in private aviation, so that may make the bar harder to clear again. But I think the whole 13000 days estimate demonstrates how even tiny improvements there can easily account for large changes, too.