[ylhert]

The cognitive dissonance people have around this issue is astonishing. We are willing to ground the 737MAX fleet when a few people get a (surely terrifying) open air flying experience; but 44,000 people are killed on the road in the US _every_ year (and rising!) and very few people seem to care. In most age cohorts, death by car is the largest killer. In the US you have a 1 in 107 chance of dying in a car crash in your lifetime. Even simple and completely reasonable measures to reduce these insane numbers are seen as some kind of tyrannical affront to ones freedom (see the current CA measure to add speed limiters).

The car industry, car culture, and car centric thinking in the US and much of the world is totally out of control.

[npteljes]

I too have thought a lot about this cognitive dissonance. I think that there are several differences to the two issues, and so, in people's attitude towards it too.

One, I think, is that flying is something that is being done to us, and driving is something that we do ourselves. So the agency, the point of view is very different. Something bad happening while being passive is much more horrifying because of the powerlessness.

The other is that cars and driving environments differ a lot, while planes are much more similar to each other. What I mean by this is that it's easier to dissociate the car deaths, because that happens to some other people over there, nothing like me, but plane badness happens to everyday folk in a big winged tube, like me.

I think that if we drove the planes ourselves, the issues would be much more similar. And similarly, if everyone took the train, the bus, or a ship, and similar things would happen to a train, bus or ship, the freakout would be similar to what we see now with planes.

[nayuki]

> is that flying is something that is being done to us, and driving is something that we do ourselves. So the agency, the point of view is very different.

Correct. An all-too-popular viewpoint is, "I'm a good driver, unlike everybody else on the road!".

> if everyone took the train, the bus, or a ship, and similar things would happen to a train, bus or ship, the freakout would be similar to what we see now with planes

I believe this is the case already. A train or bus kills a few hundred a year, it makes national news for a week. Don't get me wrong, it's a tragedy and needs to be fixed. But then, those 44k car-related deaths are continually brushed aside.

[NoPicklez]

I agree with this a lot.

I think the dissonance is surely curbed when sitting in a plane at cruising altitude realising that I am much more worried if these engines break down as opposed to my car, as I am likely to fall out of the sky.

Planes if broken down fall from the sky. Cars that breakdown don't. The people operating the plane are well trained, any tom dick and harry can drive a car without any check on their mental and physical state before they hop behind the wheel.

[MBlume]

If you're a child, or someone too disabled to drive, driving is consistently something being done to you

[pyinstallwoes]

But how many crashes are from the same model and from engineering vs pilot error?

[nuancebydefault]

1 death by car crash in 107 in a lifetime, meaning 106 other ways of dying in a lifetime. Everything is relative.