The guy saying “do whatever it takes” doesn’t represent an actual person though. Nobody’s doing anything about the aviation industry either
Imagine if about 5% of drivers stopped driving because of 1 car crash. That would rile up the auto and oil industries.
because it affects richer people.
I think it would be interesting to present the numbers of death and heavily injured people while specifying the ones who were not at all in charge. I mean, the passengers, the pedstrians, the ones in some vehicles that were not responsible of the accident.
This, because most drivers believe they drive that well that it would not happen to them ; and that make them blind to the fact good drivers and non-drivers may be involved and hurt in accidents.
Vehicles (cars) with multiple passengers get in way fewer collisions
Because most cars have only one occupant?
Oh sorry I phrased it incorrectly. They are less likely to get in a collision presumably because the driver is more careful.
I think the illusion of control is a factor. People largely feel in control of their own fate behind the wheel, whereas on a plane you must completely surrender control and trust others to be competent.
I also think most people assume a plane crash will always be a deadly event whereas a car crash is a minor inconvenience that is sometimes fatal.
May as well throw this in.
I’m brainstorming for a horror story, called Sanewashing. A terribly sloppy serial killer is murdering people all around a town, but keeps getting away with it because no one is assigning urgency or panic to his rampage - instead preferring everyone keep calm.
At one point, the protagonist learns his best friend has been slain; and panics. But then he learns that it happened in a car crash, not a murder, and he sighs in relief.
Some terrible things have been done to cars in the name of “safety.” Mothers Against Drunk Driving pushed Congress to mandate car manufacturers to have AI equipped driver facing cameras to detect if the driver is impaired in future models. Privacy is being killed in the name of safety and secretly for profits through data mining.
Huh, this kind of made me think of a new perspective on why people are reluctant to swap out of their cars. And its because car accidents “feel” personal
For instance, if I were to get in an accident with an old woman, I’m more likely to be angry at the old woman for crashing into me, rather then get angry at the system that allowed to her drive. Resulting in me simply discriminating who should be driving, instead of thinking of finding an alternative solution for how to move them around.
plames are very safe tho
Specifically as a result of intense, continuous regulation and oversight. it falls apart fast without that. That’s the whole subtext of the meme. If you needed 10,000 training hours, were subject to regular drug and mental health testing, required to do continuous maintenance after every drive by a trained support crew, and had to submit a trip plan to a federal authority before every time you got behind the wheel I’m fairly certain they’d have a plane-like safety record too.
Cars are closer to general aviation than commercial though, and GA planes crash all the damn time because of pilots doing stupid things or not maintaining their equipment.
An airliner would be closer to maybe a coach bus where the driver does go through additional training and scrutiny and the equipment is maintained by a specialized crew. Coach buses have a much lower fatality rate than passenger cars.
Or rather if cars were subject to FAA-like regulation, most automotive car travel would be bus travel. And a few rich idiots could take their own lives in their hands in their personal
CessnasCivics.Don’t need to be “rich” to fly a 50 year old single-prop plane. You can buy one for the cost of a Honda Civic. I would be fully onboard with much stricter licensing requirements that push more people onto public transit though.
Should have added one where a car bumps a bike and the guy ends up at the hospital pay for his own fault.
It is kind of comical how every airplane accident is thoroughly investigated and systemic changes immediately proposed and implemented, while mothers of dead children have to petition for a stop sign. And I don’t mean airliners, I mean people in their little 2-4 seater Cessnas who took off when it was clear and couldn’t find the runway when the weather changed.
Then I remember that everyone in those little planes are really rich and it all makes sense.
Could be related to the fact that life insurance companies typically pay out like 4x for common carrier deaths (e.g. planes, buses, trains, roller coasters)
I wouldn’t say the NTSB thoroughly investigates every small GA crash. There are quite a few where the they don’t even go to the crash site and just do it via phone interview. They’ll send investigators out when there’s something to learn that might affect airworthiness of the other existing aircraft of the same make & model. But if it’s fairly apparent that the pilot just fucked up, they often don’t send investigators out.
But if it’s fairly apparent that the pilot just fucked up, they often don’t send investigators out.
Yeah but then there’s investigation whether something could be done to reduce the chance of that specific fuckup
Yup, and what sounds crazy, when those thourough investigations happen the investigators focuse on what “external factors” could have lead to the crash. Not automatically assuming pilot error/fault or negligence right away.
Once those factors are found, systemic changes are immediately proposed and implemented as you noted. Which leads to that same error not being repeated once again.
The path to safe infrastructure is usually not just “remove all barriers” but instead “control the flow of traffic”
For example when a car hits a building, which happens pretty much daily in North America, it’s automatically “driver fault”. No changes are implemented to the area, nothing restricting another car or vehicle from hitting the exact same building again. No “barriers” implemented to control the flow of traffic.
European countries on the otherhand, when collisions happen the investigation generally leans more towards what caused the driver to collide with something. Not automatically assuming the driver intentionally collide with something.
You don’t investigate the things where you know you’ll get an answer you don’t like reducing the size and weight of cars, invest in other means of transportation, change zoning.
Depends on the plane, I remember having a shop class teacher who had a plane that they flew on the weekends.
It’s not cheap, but definitely doable for someone who was roughly middle income in the early 2000s, dunno about now. It’s comparable to another car, especially if you can do a lot of the maintenance yourself.
Maybe it’s like owning a horse or a boat, can be cheap or expensive depending on locality. Just checked prices in my ritzy area, and a outdoor tie down is less than $200/month–not too bad.
I found a 27 year old Cessna single engine for sale for $300,000, and that I believe is a standard starter plane, though if the wind doesn’t bother you, I also see an open cockpit cub for $80k.
You can get way cheaper than that. trade-a-plane.com has Cessnas from the 60s and 70s under $40k, some of them air-worthy with no additional work! $300k is “brand new airplane” money and that’s not what most people get their license with.
Guy i play soccer with is a pilot. He went in with 4 other pilots and they all share the cost and basically have to check it out/reserve it when they want to fly.
Im not sure what kind of plane it is, but its large enough they also run a little side hustle using it like an air taxi as a supplemental income to support their hobby
Back in like 2010 one of my friends bought a Cessna for $50k pretty much right after graduating high school. I wonder if prices have really gone up that much, or if he got a sweet deal back then.
Granted his dad was also a pilot and they shared a grass strip with some neighbors way out in the country, and had their own hangar. So besides the plane, there wasn’t really any additional cost for him.
But he did buy it himself. Dude was a hustler, buying, fixing, and flipping go karts, boats, motorcycles, cars, etc since he was like 13. So makes sense planes were next on that list.
In fairness, it’s not the 1M crashes I’m worried about so much as the 40k deaths.
I’ve been in a few fender benders, and I’ll argue that cars are pretty safe when they are small, move at low speeds, and aren’t operated aggressively.
I might argue the problem with cars versus planes is that the standards for plane Operation are much higher. Meanwhile, any asshole is given a car license.
One thing I like in SEA is that often a car liscense requires a motorbike liscense; the default personal transportation is less dangerous to the public and to operate a 2 ton machine, you have to have experienced both sides.
Organizations like the NHTSA actually do study car accidents and safety. There’s a problem of scale though. There are so many more car accidents than plane crashes that studying them thoroughly in an individual manner becomes impossible.
But investigations do happen, especially when trends evolve. Hence all the various improvements to car safety over the decades. There’s been a significant reduction in automobile related casualties per distance driven over the history of the technology. Think things like crumple zones and seatbelts, and more recently automatic braking.
Yet deaths are up, especially for pedestrians and cyclists. Per distance driven is the wrong metric anyway since more highway miles makes the system appear safer than it actually is. Plus automakers and regulators prioritize occupant safety, not actual absolute safety. And traffic “engineers” optimize travel time while ignoring things like induced demand. The regulators (US focus) are an absolute joke whem it comes to safety, as the multitude of gigantic pickup trucks and SUVs and the dogshit infrastructure clearly show.
That is because rich people could die in plane crashes.
But poor people are the ones likely to die in a car crash
It’s because cars are very dangerous and critical to the American economy. By the seat/mile airplanes are much less dangerous, so we’re allowed to talk about it.
Cars have never been critical to the economy. They have been the false justification to avoid funding public transportation properly
Fuck cars! I’m with you homie.
With that said, ~80% of Americans drive to work… so saying that cars aren’t critical to the American economy disconnects from reality.
That’s not what “critical” means though. I could say tuna is critical to my health because 80% of my protein comes from tuna, but a sane person would be like “why is you so obsessed with tuna” and “there are other kinds of food out there”. Most people dont even try anything different. My fucking neighbors drives their kids to school because they are too lazy to wake up 15 minutes earlier to catch the school bus, and waste an extra 20 minutes of their time in the process. Most car trips are less than a few miles in the US or something like that.
I’d argue we’d have a much stronger economy with dramatically fewer personal cars and car trips.
I agree w you that less cars frees more capital for other productive investments which could build a stronger economy.
I disagree on what critical means. If the cars and tech to mfg them disappeared tomorrow, the American economy would crumble. The dependence on them is what makes them critical, they’ve become like air. That’s not to say it has to be that way forever, but it is at the present moment.
