I'm not sure that this is a helpful way to look at things. Cars are much safer than they could be and the risk per mile is low, but driving is still one of our big sources of risk, precisely because we do it so much.

Similarly, I estimate ~2 deaths per million cigarettes smoked (~1000 cigarettes/year/person >= age 15, 480k deaths/year), and while driving a hundred miles in a day is unremarkable, smoking 100 cigarettes in a day is pretty astonishing, but I wouldn't say that cigarettes are not that risky. The total deaths per capita are high.

(To be clear: cigarettes are more dangerous than driving any way you measure it. I'm just showing that you get to weird places if you look at risk/unit, without looking at total volume).

Driving is still the biggest source of risk because the risk from everything else is now basically zero.

This. If driving was the only cause of death, and we did nothing but drive from birth we would expect to live to ~250 years old on average.

That number makes driving feel less safe to me.

(Holding the risk per mile driven constant, from current driving patterns. Risk might increase with more drivers on the road, especially given they're all driving ~16 hour shifts.)

So if we find the cure for all diseases, we still need to figure out how not to drive to become immortals.

I enjoyed your message, and it reminded me of a completely unrelated fallacy.

If 1 women can produce a baby in 9 months, then 9 women can produce a baby in 1 month.

I've always heard that one as "A Project Manager is someone who thinks 9 women working together can produce a baby in 1 month."

And 28% of those deaths were alcohol related.

And a further 16% of those deaths were related to the use of other drugs such as marijuana.

https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...

And those are just the drugs/alcohol related deaths related to driving.

I wonder what happens if you compare driving to other activities, by stretching them out to the 3-4 trillion miles - but in time and then compare death rates. E.g. taking swimming 2hrs per day (maybe equivalent to the 2-3 hrs spent in cars daily). Higher or lower death rates?

This might have some useful info for you... https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1026.html

death rates per million hours of activity

Do you know what 'residential fire' means? I'm imagining a scenario where my residence is on fire, which would seem to be high-risk (but is somehow the lowest risk).

It's a time-based rate based on (presumably) lifetime hours. Obviously if a residence is on fire, you're at high risk. But the rate of that happening is quite low.

That would make sense, except the unit is 'Fatalities per million hours'. Maybe they mean "fatalities from residential fire per million hours of living in a residence"?

I assume it means "per million hours of living." (Though I guess it could be "per million hours of living in a residence")

The problem with the unqualified "per million hours of living" is that sky diving doesn't kill more people than passenger cars.

It must be "fatalities from X during Y", and that makes sense when X and Y are the same thing (e.g. sky diving), but it seems like X and Y diverge in some of these entries.

Though even skydiving has a very different time/risk profile than, say, mountain climbing (however you care to define). If skydiving time is measured only by time from leaving the plane to hitting the ground, you're measuring a fatality rate against a pretty short interval of time. (Same with scuba diving.)

Whereas other activities that may have similar risk profiles for typical "active participants" may have much different rates relative to the time spent actively participating in the activity.

There's no single metric that really represents a correct view.

Thanks! That’s really a great source. I am so glad I asked. Highlights:

- Fishing seems to be quite dangerous!!??

- Swimming is less dangerous than living (all other causes)!

"Fishing" might include "working on an industrial-scale fishing boat", which is a notoriously dangerous line of work.

For some, "fishing" means "getting drunk on a boat, with no real intent of seeing a fish." Alcohol is a very common factor in boating accidents, somewhere between 15-50% depending on which source you look at. (I think the higher end of that range is likely closest to the truth.)

This is true for commercial ships too. Drug use (both alcohol and various illegal drugs) is something humans turn to when they are bored, and life aboard a ship can be very boring. If it gets exciting again while you're impaired that is likely to go very badly wrong very quickly.

Airline pilots have sometimes been caught, most flights just aren't long enough for you to be sober at both ends yet drunk during the flight - but for the crew of a tramp freighter so long as they sleep it off before they come into port nobody will know - unless there's an accident and suddenly everything is happening with unseemly haste.

Swimming vs 'living' seems intuitively weird to me too. I guess people who are otherwise in poor health tend to avoid swimming?

I think it shows the limit of time-based normalization. E.g. hunting and snowmobiling come out very safe per hour, but a typical participant might spend many more hours in those activities.

That the rate (not time based) for fishing is so high does seem a bit odd. I wonder a bit what all is being lumped in there. I assume it's because it's an activity that can involve water, boats, and sometimes alcohol.

Even if you're on the shore it's easy to slip and hit your head on a rock. Also, many other sports that are listed self-select for athleticism or physical ability.

Any time you are operating in water, your mode of failure goes from falling to drowning.

Rocks are slippery.

Searching for keyword micromort may also help. It's the concept of deaths/unit time spent on something.

Interesting indeed! I’ve heard the same concept called “nano deaths”

My rule is that the phrase "X is the Nth leading cause of death among group Y" is only used to make this seem a lot worse than it is.

Note that this says nothing about how many actually die from X. And what is the Nth leading cause, depends entirely on how you classify causes.

The leading cause of death could be 80% of deaths or 4%. But most people will read probably the phrase as "more than half of deaths".

It might be safe personally, but not necessarily for others. I'm guessing the death statistics don't count the deaths caused by cars such as running into pedestrians or cyclists or air pollution deaths as driving deaths?

But cities designed for cars encourage people to go farther. The distances that people go are not a fixed quantity.