Indeed. It is perhaps due to the 700mph, 6,000 feet in the air part that makes them especially jittery. True or not, I think most people feel safer in a car & probably feel like they are more likely to survive, due to 60mph 12 inches off the ground.

(While flying is safer in many ways like deaths per mile or per passenger, I would bet you are a lot safer in a car than a plane in the event of a crash. Car crashes are dangerous, but plane crashes are nearly guaranteed fatalities)

No. It's hundreds of people dying at a time with nothing that any of them can do to mitigate their fate. People are really poor at assessing risk, but marvelous at concocting horror stories.

(I can see that you are not from California. At 60mph, you are in serious danger of being rear-ended.)

Given the nature of public transport I think we can discount the "out of my control" factor. We can even remove the human element; driverless trains are found in quite a few places and nobody is screaming in terror on them.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_trains

So what is it about flying? Probably the whole "trapped in a metal tube travelling at 500mph a mile above the ocean" thing.

Plus trains are more or less locked into a path.

Yep. I hate flying, but would pay a lot of money for a driverless car, and sleep like a baby while I commute to work.

It may be the fact that the airplane is in the air that makes the difference. Being 20,000 feet in the air is quite different than cruising along on the highway in a bus.

That being said, I wonder what the driverless cars would do for the blind/visually-impaired. It could be quite liberating for them. They wouldn't have to live near public transit/take jobs with public transit access. Neat.