this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Sure, but nobody here is talking about statistics. This article, this entire conversation, is about trust and confidence. I'm confident I can drive a car to the store and not die. Statistically, I'm more likely to die in an accident within a mile from my house, but that doesn't stop me from driving in my neighborhood because I trust myself to drive. Accidents can happen anywhere to anyone, and there are a lot of other drivers to be worried about, but I can take steps to mitigate some of that risk. The higher chance of dying in my car doesn't make anyone feel better about flying, it just makes you feel worse about driving. The two levels of trust are unrelated.
Like I know I have a higher chance of being killed by a deer. Statistically, deer kill a lot of people by causing car accidents, and they spread diseases. Wolves don't kill anyone. Wolf attacke are extremely rare, and increasing the population of wolves in the wild would be very good for our North American ecosystems. But if I'm sitting in my backyard, and a wolf approaches from the left and a deer approaches from the right, I'm going to be worried about the wolf. Statistics don't enter into the thought process.
I need to trust planes to board one. I have to drive my kids to school, so I have to get comfortable with the risk of getting behind the wheel. I don't have to get on a Boeing airplane.
But you don't have to drive, that's a cultural misconception.
One day my car's battery was completely dead. Instead of just having my kids take the day off, I took them in my bicycle trailer and picked up a new battery on my way home. I could totally go without a car if necessary.
Taking a bus or train is much safer than driving. Cycling is also net healthier than driving because the health benefits outweigh the conflict with cars. We spend so much money researching ways to make cars safer (air bags, crumple zones, lane drift alerts, etc), yet it's still incredibly dangerous.
The problem with driving is that people "feel" safer than they are and get complacent. It's similar to someone working in a large machining plant or something, they'll feel safer after a year than a week on the job, but they're probably more at risk because they're more complacent about the risks.
But they absolutely should. If you want to be safer, trust the statistics. Almost any mode of transportation is safer than driving, and the ones more dangerous than driving are often more dangerous because of cars.
Airplanes are still way safer than cars. Yeah, one had a door blow out, but the risk of something like that happening is so incredibly low compared to someone crashing into your car that it's almost not worth talking about. The news overreports the one-off cases and underreports the common cases, because surprising news sells. If the news reported every car death, you'd quickly stop reading it because it's just so common.