That's based on deaths per mile, right? I'm not sure that is the best way to compare different kinds of transport.
For an extreme example imagine a company that offers trips to the Andromeda galaxy on a fleet of starships. Each ship carries 100 passengers.
There's a 99% chance that the ship explodes when they turn on the warp drive which kills everyone on board. If the ship doesn't explode it will make it safely to the destination.
The passenger fatality rate for that service is only 0.0000000000000069 fatalities per mile. That's nearly 5 orders of magnitude lower than the rate for commercial airlines. It's over 8 orders of magnitude lower than for cars.
But I doubt many people here would consider that to actually be safer than the drive to the spaceport.
> Not to mention multiple orders of magnitude safer than driving to the airport.
I guess that's counting accidents per distance. Which is a weird metric if you compare a vehicle that is going some 560 miles per hour with one that is going not even 55 mph on average.
By that metric, using a space shuttle is safer than commuting by bicycle in Europe (which is not only extremely safe if you wear a helmet, cycling will statistically make your life longer instead of shorter, in spite of the accident risk, so large are the health advantages..)
If I need to go to a place 1600 km away and can choose between a car or a plane then fatal accident per km is a metric I would use to see what would be a probability of a fatal accident in either case.
Is it, are there any stats to support this? Driving to the airport is different from driving in general where most accidents happen when you are sleepy or close to home. Most deaths occur on two lane highways
> The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has stated that more than 50 percent of all car crashes happen within 25 miles of drivers' homes.
But.. do you not do more than 50% of your driving near your home? This doesn't sound like a meaningful statistic at all.
Define close to home. The other responder noted 25 miles. Having lived in cities most my life, I don't think I have ever lived farther than 25 miles to a major airport. But a quick google search: you have somewhere between about a 1 in a 101 to a 1 in 15,000 lifetime chance of dying in a car wreck in the USA and about a 1 in 11,000,000 to 1 in 821,000,000 for lifetime chance of dying in an airplane crash. Even if you take the best odds for cars and the worst odds for airplanes, it's still multiple orders of magnitude...
flying is not safer than driving- unless you drive 500 miles with 150 other people every time you get in the car- statistics are massaged, and I think risk of accident per journey is better (and is higher in flying)
For an extreme example imagine a company that offers trips to the Andromeda galaxy on a fleet of starships. Each ship carries 100 passengers.
There's a 99% chance that the ship explodes when they turn on the warp drive which kills everyone on board. If the ship doesn't explode it will make it safely to the destination.
The passenger fatality rate for that service is only 0.0000000000000069 fatalities per mile. That's nearly 5 orders of magnitude lower than the rate for commercial airlines. It's over 8 orders of magnitude lower than for cars.
But I doubt many people here would consider that to actually be safer than the drive to the spaceport.