Why you've never been in a plane crash

One current theory is speed (citation below).

Ironically, heavy traffic is one of the better "safety features" of our automobile transportation system. Since crowded roads are higher-conflict roads, there is a bit of luck in the fact that traffic slows down when it gets crowded. There may be more collisions, but they are less deadly.

Suddenly there is a pandemic, and there are orders of magnitude fewer people on the roads. The number of collisions goes down, but the number of deaths goes up, because all of the collisions are at higher, deadlier speeds.

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Driving Went Down. Fatalities Went Up. Here's Why. by Charles Marohn

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/10/driving-went-d...

Note that deaths per vehicle mile traveled (VMT) went up during Covid. Reducing commuting time doesn't necessarily reduce deaths under that metric -- just the opposite! Commuter trips are probably the safest per VMT since they're the most familiar.

There were stories about this effect, even as total collisions went down because of the bigger drop in VMT[1]. I speculated that this was a combination of

a) the above effect (stripping out the safer commuter trips), plus

b) the roads being dominated by people least willing to follow the advice to stay home, which correlates with being anti-social and reckless (mean though that sounds! [2])

My facebook friends suggested

c) the immense stress of coping with the Covid world made the average person less able to concentrate.

I also suspect:

d) traffic enforcement was reduced and drivers gradually started branching out into more aggressive maneuvers as they became aware of this.

Note that people saw their car insurance rates go down during covid because the typical personal policy only cares about accidents per unit time, and rarely adjusts for miles driven.

But I don't know why it hasn't regressed to the pre-covid levels -- probably because WFH hasn't completely reversed.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39179818

Unpopular opinion, but the truth: We have to drive and it's a right. I agree about the infrastructure issues. Still the modern "safe driving" mentality that people want is at odds with that REALITY.

This could change with public transit, however we don't do this. Even the best countries fall short, and most don't get close. It's actively discouraged in the USA.

Actually, you could argue that people already have to deal with too much BS to drive. The paperwork, rules, and so forth clearly are challenging for people to adhere to. So we throw the majority of people into a situation they aren't equipped for on a daily basis. Then this becomes a major cause of legal efforts, that alienate perfectly good citizens from society and cause us to forfeit our civil rights.

You can claim that people just need to be responsible, or we need to pass some safety law but it's delusional. The truth is we don't have a replacement for this. The average person can't afford to be carted around, and we would need to get to a place where driving was purely recreation.

So we are going to need very good public mass transit options, and IMO some kind of vast network of professional drivers that are more affordable than Uber, for the occasional "cargo trips" or to go "the last mile" (more like 10-50).

Mostly agreed, except for:

> We have to drive and it's a right.

WTF? Driving is by definition a privilege. You're maneuvering a 2-ton murder machine.

We got into the current mess because people treat driving as a right - I have to have parking, I have to get there fast, I have to bend everything society to fit my car. And when someone gets caught for a DUI, judges go lenient because they know that taking away their license will obliterate their means to work and live.

> So we are going to need very good public mass transit options, and IMO some kind of vast network of professional drivers that are more affordable than Uber

Sort of. We need denser cities and mixed-use neighborhoods so that people can live close to the goods and services they need. Transit is a feasible problem as evidenced by Europe and Asia. No society has operated under the assumption of a vast network of professional private vehicle drivers (so, disregard bus drivers).

> go "the last mile" (more like 10-50)

That's the problem. We have to stop designing cities like that.

This system does in fact work very well for aviation in the USA. But I think we can't just blindly apply it to everything everywhere, assuming it will work the same. We should be able to consider what cultural factors allow it to work and what might cause it to fail. Among those reasons:

* It expects everybody in the organization to be earnest rule-followers doing the best they can to achieve the goals of their organization. The uncaring, reckless, rebellious, etc people have been screened out of the organization long before it gets to that point.

* It expects that the whole organization has cultural unity. Nobody is trying to hoard status, power, influence, etc for one subset of the organization at the expense of another.

* It expects that the organization as a whole is not, and does not perceive itself to be, under attack from hostile outside forces. Organizations can effectively fear being blamed and destroyed just as well as individuals can.