> Road deaths are double the OECD average.

I think you overstate that.

Consider fatalities per billion vehicle kilometers -- Americans drive more than the OECD average. The Czech Republic and Korea have rates triple those of the next closest OECD country, and the US fares better than Japan and Belgium.

Not only is it not Mad Max, it's basically within the norms of the OECD.

https://asset.keepeek-cache.com/medias/domain21/_pdf/media26...

I've been saying for a while that in the US, the real killer is the suburban infrastructure.

Forget guns. Way more people are dying in car crashes than from any other violent cause or accident type. And, as you said, Americans aren't bad drivers per se.

It's just that in the US, there are way more miles driven per person than in European countries. This number - and the car fatalities - drop in dense cities like NYC with public transportation that works.

I've always found being in a car in Korea terrifying, so I'm glad to have statistics to back up my impressions.

"Driving in the US is like a mad max situation. Many unnecessary deaths are preventable. Road deaths are double the OECD average."

All of the recent discussion of road deaths and deaths per million miles, etc., usually have a clarifying post/comment which notes that these figures include motorcycles and commercial trucks ... which skew the numbers dramatically.

Does your own day to day (car) driving experience actually seem like a mad max scenario ?

Can you compare driving in the United States to, for instance, driving in Guatemala or El Salvador or Vietnam ?

I suspect not ...

Probably because our odds of dying in a car crash are still something like 1/10,000. It's remote enough to not seem real.

One in 10k? Nonsense.

> Your odds of dying in a car crash, over the span of your entire life, are somewhere in between 1 and 50 and 1 and 100. — http://www.asktheodds.com/death/car-crash-odds/

> Chance of dying in transportation accidents (mostly motor vehicles): 12 per 10k per year — https://www.livescience.com/

> Lifetime odds of death by motor vehicle crash, United States, 2016: 1 in 102 — http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-ov...

If you don’t know anyone killed in a car accident, you are very lucky.

> Lifetime odds of death by motor vehicle crash, United States, 2016: 1 in 102

If you only drive sober, always wear a seatbelt, and only drive cars with the highest NHTSA ratings then your lifetime chances are probably more like 1 in 300, if not less.

That said, your chances of getting seriously injured in a car crash are significantly greater than that.

Or move to a Scandinavia where the crash rate is ~30% of the US, measured by population (which is probably the measure these stats use).

Don't apply stats like this to yourself, use them to guide policy instead.

Why would you measure by population? Shouldn't it be by distance driven?

Otherwise cities like NYC would have a really low rate since so many people don't have cars.

Well that depends. If what I care about is not dying then going twice as far but still dying isn't an improvement.

Measure the thing you actually care about. After issuing metal helmets to infantry in WW1 the number of men hospitalised with head injuries climbed enormously. Were helmets a bad idea? Nope. To get hospitalised first you need to survive your injuries.

The fact that most of us on Manhattan don't own cars unfortunately does not mean that we walk through tree lined streets empty of large, heavy and dangerously driven motor vehicles.

For this subject matter per capita (should really be per licensed driver to account for different rates of public transit usage between populations but per capita is close) is appropriate because people care about the likelihood of something over a lifetime.

Miles driven would be useful too but not as directly useful in evaluating odds of any one random person dying in a car crash.

Regardless, I'm be interested in seeing the stats broken down by accident type (which is tracked by the police and insurance companies to some extent).

My suspicion is that there's several accident modes that are more common in North America that make up most of the difference.

I also suspect that just like pretty much ever other thing that's common at scale but statistically unlikely at the individual level socioeconomic status is the best predictor.

No - because those numbers are pulled from the actual driving population(where people drive drunk, sometimes don't wear a seatbelt, and drive in cars ranging built over 40+ years with a wide range of safety standards. To do better than 1 in 102 means you only need to behavior better than the population average, not perform perfectly at all times.

If a high-winnings lottery had these odds, I'd be playing every month. As far as roads go though, I choose to minimise my exposure to nearly all motorists by avoiding most roads altogether (this is possible to do in many places, but I concede not all places).

Those statistics are over one's entire lifetime, though, a lifetime full of potential accidents. How do they translate to a per-trip chance?

Its many orders of magnitude more likely for your kids to die in a car than be kidnapped by a stranger. Look at our paranoia in the US about 'stranger-danger'.. Humans on average don't comprehend the odds.. its about what scares them on the news.

It's about 1 in 10000 every year.

"Mad Max", where the heck do you live in the US?

Probably Houston where two thirds of drivers on the road weave in and out of traffic high on coke and drunk, have no insurance, regard for safety of themselves or others, a huge stack of arrest warrants, driving $200 salvage titled cars crumpled body work and partially collapsed frames from their last hit and run with the eternal doctored and expired paper tags and high-beams on at all times. A video of a typical day on the road can be found by searching "wwwy2000 houston"

Are you arguing for reducing aviation safety, or a massive investment in road safety like places like Sweden have done? I honestly can't tell.

Greater road safety. He's saying because of the high cost of aviation safety, more people choose to drive than pay that cost, but driving is statistically much more dangerous. So we should address road safety since so many people are driving...

Greater road safety. Aviation is a rare area where US government has done well regulating for safety. There’s no reason we can’t be as strict with cars. It’s a choice to accept risks.

> There’s no reason we can’t be as strict with cars.

There is. Money and lots of it. "Oh, poor, working class person; you can't afford $5000-6000 per year in exploratory inspections? Well, no car for you then. We really can't be too safe, you know..."

As an airplane owner, there's no way in hell the public would stand for the amount of maintenance and inspections given to aircraft for their cars.

"Every year, completely remove the interior of the car, pull up the floorboards, lubricate and check tensions on all control cables, check the engine compression and visually inspect the valves, ..." I think my A36 has ~50 hours of mandatory inspections (at $105-125/hr) every 12 calendar months. That's before anything gets fixed (and of course, whatever gets broken during the inspections is also fixed on my dime).

I'm not even sure that it particularly contributes to the good safety record, since most of the fatals are pilot-induced (just as most of the fatals on the road are driver-induced).

It doesn't need to reach that level of extreme immediately. Just follow what the Dutch did starting all the way back in the late '70s to address their road toll.

There are many many places that have far better driver safety records - start by learning from those. A lack of improvement isn't inevitable.

What do you think the ever-growing set of safety features it is illegal to sell cars in the United States without is for? The idea that nobody cares and nobody tries to enforce safety is quite questionable -- there's simply a lot more driving going on, and not only by highly trained professionals. It's a harder problem.

The difference is that one's own behavior behind the wheel is the primary driver of motor vehicle safety, while one's own behavior typically affects aircraft safety not one bit.

Agree with the later part, but with the former, I'm sure in a large percentage of auto fatalities the victim was not at fault.

But despite the statistics, I feel safer being in control. It's a funny cognitive bias.

I also like the recovery plan for a dangerous driving situation better (swerve or pull over and slow down) because the danger is usually mitigated in seconds. In aviation a dangerous situation can persist for minutes depending on how far away the emergency landing spot is and how high the plane is.

Drunk driving accounts for roughly 25% of the driving fatalities. Not sure how many of that cohort are victims as opposed to the drunks.

Are we counting drunk pedestrians getting hit by cars as car crash fatalities?

Being drunk near heavy equipment drastically increases the chances of said heavy equipment killing you but less so if you've got a bunch of safety systems to save your life when you crash said heavy equipment.

You don’t think fear of flying contributes to people choosing to drive?

Flying does make me nervous. When the driving time to a destination is less than about 6 hours or so, I seriously consider going by car, even though I know it's more dangerous. At least in a car, I'm in control of the vehicle, and will have something to do in an emergency (try to swerve, pull over, etc.). As a passenger on a plane all I can do is sit and wait for my doom.

TSA makes me drive exponentially more than I would otherwise.

Dealing with the airport is terrible now. I flew probably 80+ times a year as a consultant in the 90s. My wife would drop me off 30 minutes before my flight (DFW), I'd curb check my bag and walk onto the plane and wait 5-10 so minutes until takeoff. It's hard to deal with the 2+ hours of bullshit security theater now.

I forget to take my knives out frequently, have never had them confiscated, but my toothpaste, yeah, that's a threat. Hell, the Lithium Ion batteries are probably the biggest threat, no issues there either.

You would love it in New Zealand.

If I have my ticket on my phone and I'm flying on a turboprop, I can literally arrive at the airport 5 minutes before they close the door and board the plane. I've done it before.

Even flying international is easy, took me a grand total of 10 minutes to go through security a few weeks ago.

TSA pre-check makes a big difference - almost like flying before, except you get to walk past all those other lines.

I didn't want to explicitly support the TSA, so I went with "Global Entry" - same benefits and more, and company paid for it. I have no idea if funds go to TSA or not, but I felt better about it.

People don't remember just how good it used to be. I used to lock my luggage securely, carry a knife on my person, and walk with my friends/family to the gate. Nobody asked pointless yes/no questions about the history of my luggage. When the airport wasn't busy, they might not bother to have the security station open at all, and just waved everyone through. A couple times, we drove to the airport an hour or two before the flight and bought tickets at the check-in counter (it was a very early flight that was never full), and this didn't arouse any suspicion. You didn't need to get out government ID for anything, since tickets weren't locked to the purchaser.

"TSA pre-check" sounds like it eliminates one inconvenience of flying in the USA in 2018, but not the other 34. I can't imagine what it might take to make me want to get on an airplane again.

Until everyone does it. I've seen the pre-check line longer than the normal line.

The pre-check line doesn't involve all of the slow-downs the regular line does. I've seen it longer too but it easily moves 10x as many people through.

Nothing needs to be removed except metal in your pockets, you typically walk quickly through a metal detector instead of the slow body scanner, and while they probably shouldn't, bags don't seem to get looked at as thoroughly either, so no delays while your backpack gets sent through twice and then pulled off to the side to be inspected.

Pre-check-level security can move more people through faster, though, so if everyone does it, it will still reduce overall/average wasted time.

> TSA makes me drive exponentially more than I would otherwise.

So you're saying that the rate of increased driving due to the TSA is proportional to the total miles you've driven?

That is a problem.

This is 100% the reason why I prefer driving. It is a matter of control, even if the numbers prove that won't reduce the risk to my life. I'm almost as nervous as a passenger in a car as I am on a plane.

I suggest you find and watch some crash videos. You are not in as much control as you'd like to believe. A lot of the time, one bad actor creates a scenario in which the others have no chance to escape.

Why would I ever want to do this? Why would anyone want to do this?

I consider that too, but that's really just because the risk is acceptable to me compared to the hassle of airports, TSA and car rental.

Sure some people. Not most people though. It's going to mostly be a cost thing.

On the other hand, so does not wanting to deal with security routines.

But realistically, most trips in cars are commutes and trips to the grocery store, not cross-country drives.

Maybe we're ok with our roads being statistically less safe per capita in exchange for a far greater amount of personal freedom of movement per capita?

I wish to note that it's possible to maximise both safety and freedom at the same time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NUgB_xkIvU

Weather, distance, all the other cons of cycling (groceries, passengers, other large cargo).

Yes a bike is better in terms of absolute freedom but only in situations where the trade-offs are tolerable.

I can't go pick up a piece of furniture on my bike.

> Weather, distance, all the other cons of cycling (groceries, passengers, other large cargo).

The same applies for driving, yet somehow the Dutch manage to continue a high participation rate even during bad weather.

> Yes a bike is better in terms of absolute freedom but only in situations where the trade-offs are tolerable.

We are talking about tradeoffs here - perceived or otherwise. There isn't a perfect scenario, but what systems Netherlands has in place is arguably better. Better freedoms both for riders as well as those who must drive. Perhaps also think of it in terms of gun laws in Australia vs gun laws in America, and measure where the fear lies (are schoolchildren afraid? are parents? or just mostly men?)

> I can't go pick up a piece of furniture on my bike.

Perhaps. However there are many cases where it can be and is done without a great deal of drama. At worst, you can still use a car even if others have access to alternatives - it's not a total ban we're discussing but rather higher standards before vehicles are deployed. It should be about fairness when it comes to ownership of public space.

As it stands in much of the Anglophone world, driver licences are easier to obtain than they are to lose. In fact, it's commonly possible to continue driving the very next day (or hour) after being booked for drink driving. The system is broken, and lessons need to be learnt from not only aviation safety, but from countries that do it better. However, what's somewhat evident is that places such as Silicon Valley would rather reinvent the wheel and solve any social or community problem by selling more software rather than learn from existing best practice.

Right now, the system is so imbalanced in favour of private motoring that nobody wins (not even drivers). Suburban sprawl and "might over right" however is a very popular western platform for voters, for now. Driverless cars won't come soon enough compared to the other options that already exist in Netherlands, Sweden and even perhaps Germany.

Yes - those El Salvadoreans - since they are born with only 3 fingers on each hand, they have a very difficult time using tools that were designed for people with 5 fingers on each hand.

Or.... “In the last decade, most of the big U.S. airlines have shifted major maintenance work to places like El Salvador, Mexico, and China, where few mechanics are F.A.A. certified and inspections have no teeth.”

From a Vanity Fair article linked below.

Ironically, the more US airlines outsource maintenance overseas, the better the US airline safety record has been.

Can you expand on this? I'm not well-versed in the geopolitics of aircraft maintenance.

Many air carriers perform heavy maintenance checks (which are labor intensive, taking the interior of the aircraft out and later re-installing everything) in lower-cost labor areas, all the while under the supervision of FAA-licensed mechanics, to the same published standards, at the same schedules as if it were done at a US maintenance base.

US-based labor, unions, and other pro-US-labor supporters are up in arms over it, using typical "dirty, lazy, substandard foreigners" scare tactics and implying that the safety is compromised in pursuit of dollars.

mobilefriendly is implying that aircraft mechanics in El Salvador are somehow less qualified to maintain Southwest's fleet than (presumably) American aircraft mechanics.

Probably because they don’t have the same level of professional certification and legal oversight as the FAA ensures for maintenance work performed in the USA.

That’s not how the Federal Aviation Regulations work.

Whether or not the mechanics are capable, the standards of training and inspection are probably not the same.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...

> The work is labor-intensive and complicated, and the technical manuals are written in English, the language of international aviation. According to regulations, in order to receive F.A.A. certification as a mechanic, a worker needs to be able to “read, speak, write, and comprehend spoken English.” Most of the mechanics in El Salvador and some other developing countries who take apart the big jets and then put them back together are unable to meet this standard. At Aeroman’s El Salvador facility, only one mechanic out of eight is F.A.A.-certified. At a major overhaul base used by United Airlines in China, the ratio is one F.A.A.-certified mechanic for every 31 non-certified mechanics. In contrast, back when U.S. airlines performed heavy maintenance at their own, domestic facilities, F.A.A.-certified mechanics far outnumbered everyone else. At American Airlines’ mammoth heavy-maintenance facility in Tulsa, certified mechanics outnumber the uncertified four to one. Because heavy maintenance is labor-intensive and offshore labor is cheap, there’s a perception that the work is unskilled. But that’s not true. If something as mundane as the tray of a tray table becomes unattached, the arms that hold it could easily turn into spears.

> There are 731 foreign repair shops certified by the F.A.A. around the globe. How qualified are the mechanics in these hundreds of places? It’s very hard to check. In the past, when heavy maintenance was performed on United’s planes at a huge hangar at San Francisco International Airport, a government inspector could easily drive a few minutes from an office in the Bay Area to make a surprise inspection. Today that maintenance work is done in Beijing. The inspectors responsible for checking on how Chinese workers service airplanes are based in Los Angeles, 6,500 miles away.

> Lack of proximity is only part of the problem. To inspect any foreign repair station, the F.A.A. first must obtain permission from the foreign government where the facility is located. Then, after a visa is granted, the U.S. must inform that government when the F.A.A. inspector will be coming. So much for the element of surprise—the very core of any inspection process. That inspections have had the heart torn out of them should come as no surprise. It is the pattern that has beset the regulation of drugs, food, and everything else.

> ...

> Airline mechanics at U.S. airports who perform routine safety checks and maintenance tasks before an airplane takes off report that they are discovering slipshod work done by overseas repair shops. American Airlines mechanics contended in a lawsuit last January that they had been disciplined by management for reporting numerous safety violations they uncovered on airplanes that had recently been serviced in China. Mechanics in Dallas said they had discovered cracked engine pylons, defective doors, and expired oxygen canisters, damage that had simply been painted over, and missing equipment, among other violations.

You are probably not familiar with the U.S. Federal Aviation Regulations. For an FAA-registered aircraft to be airworthy, it must have an inspection within the past 12 calendar months signed off by a specially trained, examined, and certified Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) mechanic further trained, examined, and certified with Inspection Authority (IA).

Airplanes flown for hire, such as commercial airliners, must have the equivalent of an annual inspection every hundred flight hours, also signed off by an IA.

So are you saying the information in the article I linked is false? That's great but it doesn't seem to have the problem licked, based on the information there.

I think you're conflating politics and safety.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, but I agree with you.