[roenxi]

In fairness, what matters is the rate. Although those stats don't include rates so they seem to be not-comparable.

Denmark seems to have a Boeing-737 Max accident every year, except using cars. Boeing is at 2x 737 accidents globally in the last 6 years. I'm not sure what conclusions we were expected to take from this.

[bryanrasmussen]

obviously I was being slightly facetious - especially as I am unable to find stats on bus death but I'm going to assume that rate of death in bus accidents are much less than those in car accidents because not especially serious - but if that were the case and given that there were two serious crashes of the Boeing Max and there are 1160 I guess the rate there is somewhere around .1 whereas there are 3 million cars in Denmark and 154 fatalities is .009 (again, facetiously assuming that every car was driven)

But since the statement was it was safer than taking the bus to work and given the very minimal stats shown I think it is a reasonable supposition that probably the bus is safer in Denmark although obviously it would require a significant longer and more in depth amount of analysis than one generally expends on a comment on an HN text box.

>I'm not sure what conclusions we were expected to take from this.

given very minimal stats on car accidents and assuming bus accidents much less than car accidents then it would reasonable to think hmm, probably taking the bus is somewhat safer. But not with the absolute certainty that a year long study and gathering of all relevant stats might establish.

[roenxi]

Could you maybe distill the serious parts? I'm not exactly sure what you think is joke and argument here. I'm also sceptical of whether that is a comparable approach. If I'm reading you right, you need to account for the fact that cars have lifespans and all the deaths over a lifespan get summed. Assuming a 15 year lifespan for a typical car that bumps the car figure up an order of magnitude and then the rates are basically the same (0.09 vs 0.10).

So the figures you're quoting suggest that a catastrophe in the aerospace industry is business as usual on Denmark roads. Putting aside rather important questions of methodology (eg, 737 MAXs would do a lot more trips than a typical Denmark car).

Not only that, but the 737 Max rate has likely dropped because they got a lot of attention and problems were likely remediated. It is easier to raise the engineering standards over 1,000 planes than 3,000,000 cars. You can see in the Denmark case that back in the dark eras past (like 2002) the situation was much worse but they improved quickly. Boeing will be undergoing the same process right now.