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Americans’ confidence in air travel falls after string of plane crashes, poll shows
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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Airplanes aren't as safe as trains!
And the externalities from air travel are fucking horrendous.
Totally! And trains are so much more comfortable and I don’t have to let them take my nudes before I get on.
As much as I actually like driving if I’m going to a city with good transit I vastly prefer the train. Plus the stations are usually right downtown.
The downtown stations are so very nice. I love rolling right into the core and being a few minutes from everything.
Having to train in from the airport isn't bad, but after a long trip adding another hour to get from the airport to downtown is annoying. Of course, many US cities don't have a train from the airport to downtown, so that only applies in developed locations.
One of the upcoming wacky infrastructure choices is the high speed rail in Las Vegas to LA. On the Vegas end the train station is out of town like it's an airport. So you train from LA to Vegas and then... bus in? Join a massive line of taxis/ubers? It's so very clumsy. Why the casino operators didn't find a way for the rail station to be in the center of the strip so people fall of the train and into their casinos is still beyond my ken.
In the US, air travel is safer by an order of magnitude. According to the National Safety Council, scheduled airlines have a passenger fatality rate per 100,000,000 miles of 0.001 while rail has a fatality rate of 0.025. Hell, busses are safer with a fatality rate of 0.0066.
I'm sure rail safety is probably better in Europe and Japan since they have better rail infrastructure and more passengers.
A /r/dataisbeautiful post from several years ago also shows a similar story.
Why doesn’t this compare time spent traveling over mileage traveled (genuine question)?
One would expect the vast majority of planes to be faster than the vast majority of trains, so of course they’d have less accidents per mile traveled even if the same number of accidents occurred (I think).
Whereas with time spent, maybe as an additional data point, it becomes fairer to compare, right?
Wikipedia does a good job explaining after the chart here.
Most people aren’t riding trains or buses hundreds of miles at a time, and there are FAR more people riding trains and buses. So per hour traveled, those will be safer.
But while you don’t take planes from say, one part of NYC to another, you CAN take trains and buses to other cities. So mileage becomes a more meaningful comparison. Sure a bus might be safer per hour, but a bus ride from NYC to LA will take many more hours than a plane ride.
It's because passengers (mostly) use transportation to get somewhere, not to waste time. The benefit is the distance traveled, and the risk is death. If I had the option to travel to a city 500 miles away by bus or by plane, I would want to fairly compare my chances of dying by one method vs the other
I wouldn't want to find out if traveling 1.5 hours by bus or 1.5 hours by plane was riskier. That would be apples and oranges. The bus trip might only take me 30 miles, while the plane trip would take me 500.
I don't disbelieve you but you're cherry picking one of the worst examples (possibly exceeded by Canada because of Lac-Mégantic) hell, the disaster that just happened in East Palestine, OH is an excellent study in just how awful train safety in the US is.
I averaged data from 2016 to 2022. What am I cherry picking?
I more meant that the safety of trains in the US shouldn't be used as an example for overall train safety. Other countries have much more stringent laws.
Ditto, with Canada, there are serious issues with how train safety is conducted since the majority of train traffic is freight.
But the US doesn't have other rail systems, so an apt comparison is US planes to US trains.
My original claim was that trains are safer than airplanes - I don't know why we're focusing on the US.
There were no passenger deaths for the derailment in East Palestine.
The East Palestine derailment investigation revealed a lot of flaws in safety checks and how over worked conductors were - I mentioned that incident less as a cause of danger and more due to how awful US safety laws on trains are.