In 95% of all car accidents, the driver has eaten carrot in the week prior to the accident.

you may now draw your own conclusion

Additional consideration: How safe a car trip is, can be influenced a lot by the driver. As a frequent driver (I wished I could use trains instead, but our train system regularly sucks for many connections :( ), I feel that 95+ per cent of accidents could be avoided if the driver was driving careful themselves plus anticipating the errors of other drivers. I get into so many situations that could be dangerous for me as well, but I typically avoid the danger because I see the crazy people maneuvers coming before they execute them. My hopes are that on the occasions when I make a driving mistake, someone else will be there to watch out for me as well.

Long story short: In a plane, you\re putting your life into someone else's hand. In a car, you at least have the illusion of control, but I claim that you actually do have some control over avoiding accidents.

If you are considering two modes of transportation for a airplane-suitable trip, the per-trip stat is effectively irrelevant. If we consider a 1,000 mile trip and want to choose the safest manner of travel to the destination aircraft will statistically be the safest transportation method.

Thank you, PM_Your_Nudes_Please, for an wonderfully insightful comment on the nature of statistics in transportation accidents.

I don’t really agree. If I have two choices to make a long distance trip, drive or fly, it is safer to fly. If I’m going to the grocery store, there’s no option to fly, so using those type of trips in the calculation doesn’t make sense.

If we talk about the safety of cars vs planes, we should really only be considering trips of a distance where planes are a viable option. Even then a trips per crash seems like a far worse metric than miles per crash. You want to account for complexity of the trips still.

Do you have any statistics about the total number of miles driven by cars every day vs. miles flown by planes daily? Somehow, just based on the amount of cars worldwide, I’d bet that there are far more miles driven by cars daily than miles flown by planes, so accidents per mile would still be a significant statistic. Because even though planes fligh thousands of miles per trip, cars are numbered in millions, in the US alone. So I’d bet that if every car trip was one mile, which is very conservative, you’d still have more miles driven daily than flown in the US. Which makes deaths per mile a lot more scary.

Accidents per trip would be relevant as well, but how many commercial airliners crash every day vs. how many cars crash every day? How many people die a year from commercial airline crashes vs. from car crashes? I’d bet that even per trip cars are less safe than planes.

I live in a mostly rural area, and we have had 4 deaths on the motorway nearby over the past 3 or 4 months. And that is just in one region,with low to moderate traffic and low population density (lots of farms and woods around here). Also, never knew anyone who died in a plane crash, in over 40 years, but have had 2 close friends die in car crashes, never mind acquaintances or friends of friends. And I bet everyone, in developing or developed countries, knows someone who died in a car crash, whereas I’d bet that most people don’t have even acquaintances or friend of friends that died in plane crashes.

So I’d really like to see numbers on that claim that, per trip, cars are safer, because in 2021, with no deaths from commercial planes in the US, that claim does not stand, because you could have an infinite number of car trips that year, and still be less safe than commercial planes with one single dead person.