Uh... the "Fatalities by passenger miles" chart in that article says that fatalities per billion passenger miles are 70 times lower for commercial planes vs. buses.
And in fact if you normalize to actually comparable transportation modes, my guess is it's even worse. The overwhelming majority of bus miles are driven on urban transit routes at low speed. You'd want to split out long haul (Greyhound et. al.) buses to compare to aviation, and highway travel is always going to involve more fatalities.
Basically, even knowing that it's probably the most dangerous jetliner in decades, I'd still view a 737 MAX as an extremely safe travel option.
When a regular person asks "is this safe?" they mean "is it safe for me?", not whether someone else on the vehicle might get injured.
According to [1], commercial planes are about 3 times safer than buses per passenger mile (edit: passenger hours, sorry). That doesn't sound like a large enough margin to prevent certain more accident-prone models from earning the "deadlier than a bus" badge of shame, especially since the average is skewed by extremely reliable widebody models like the 777, A340 and A380. Meanwhile, commuter planes already suffer from a higher fatality rate than pickup trucks, while private planes are second only to motorcycles.
[1] https://turbli.com/blog/the-safest-transport-modes-ranked-by...