You can’t replace flying to Hawaii with driving there. Further, short flights which may be directly comparable are vastly more dangerous per mile making the overall average meaningless.

Thus it turns out if your going on a relatively short trip ~300km or less taking a bus at ~0.04 deaths per billion passenger km is safer.

That’s one way to look at it, but i think the general feeling people have regarding air travel ( aka scare) is better explained by the « death per journey » statistic (in addition to the obvious fact that a plane .. flies).

Not to mention the fact that once you remove obviously dangerous car behaviors ( such as dui or driving with a wreck), chances of accident probably decline a lot.

Wouldn't it be more reasonable to measure per travel occasion instead? When thinking about car travel, the type of road also matters, as does the rest of the surroundings. True for airplane travel as well, but only arrival/departure seems to matter most there.

I think per travel time would be better. "Trips" in air and automobiles tend to be of very different average durations.

Car risks grow linear with length of trip while plane risks are concentrated especially at takeoff and landing. If you only count deaths/trip, it would discount much relevant information.

I too think we should reinvent the discipline of statistical analysis in this thread.

For example, richer people fly, should we adjust for that?

I love these dim headlines