[PeterisP]

Transportation safety is generally measured on a distance basis. If you compare one hour of driving vs one hour of walking, then walking is safer, but if you compare the traffic risks of driving a hundred miles and walking a hundred miles, then that's a different story.

[rconti]

This is also kind of silly; the average person doesn't walk 100 miles (say, a week). Extrapolating relative walking safety from 100ft of darting from your office building, across the street, to your lunch spot, out to 100 miles is not actually the same thing as (say) commuting by foot 5 miles each way for 10 days (where the per-step risk profile is probably a lot lower than the numbers we're extrapolating from).

[kelnos]

Yeah, agreed. I think you just need to be making apples-to-apples comparisons based on the type of trip.

If you're talking about trips of no more than a few miles (that don't include hauling too much cargo to carry), you can compare driving with walking. If you're talking about trips of tens or hundreds or thousands of miles, you have to compare driving with flying or taking a train.

I would be interested to see crash/injury/fatality stats for car trips under certain distance thresholds. I wonder if those are tracked anywhere.

[dionidium]

This is also why the safety of commercial air travel is (sometimes) overstated. Since most crashes happen on takeoff or landing, the risk profile of a 100-mile flight is about the same as for a 1000-mile flight, but on a per-mile basis the latter flight appears safer.

[dmurray]

Is this still true for commercial flights? The most prominent airliner losses from the last 20 years were not close to takeoff nor to (scheduled) landing. I'm thinking of Air France off Brazil, the two Malaysian planes, all four 9/11 attacks, and the Germanwings crash. The exception is the Concorde crash on takeoff which just sneaks into the last 20 years (July 2000).

Of course, part of the reason these crashes were newsworthy is that they were unusual. Are there enough takeoff- and landing- related losses to make these statistically irrelevant?

[dionidium]

My information may very well be out of date! This is one of those lines I've been repeating for 20 years and it might be time to update it.

[dmurray]

Looking at Wikipedia [0], there a a lot of incidents I never heard about and a disproportionate number are "shortly after takeoff".

I didn't count them all, but from eyeballing it a 1000-mile journey is 3x as likely to kill you as a 100-mile one, not 1x or 10x.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

[gsnedders]

On a per journey basis, in Europe/US/Canada, considering _only_ commercial aviation (i.e., excluding general aviation), the fatality/journey rate is comparable to both cars and walking.

[nsgi]

Also because when people are contemplating whether to fly the alternative often isn't using another form of transportation but not travelling at all and using video conferencing, or travelling a shorter distance (e.g. going on holiday more locally)