Are Planes Actually Safer Than Cars?

Rethinking accidents per miles traveled

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Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg reasserted recently that planes are far safer than cars. And at first, my mind didn’t think anything of it. I’ve worked on transportation projects and heard countless infrastructure professionals make the same assertion. And it has always made sense to me. As a society, we let pretty much anyone drive a car while making pilots train for hundreds or thousands of hours before flying large planes. And the number of cars on the road is far more than the number of planes in the sky.

It makes sense that a form of transportation where the operators are less trained would be less safe than a form of transportation where the operators are more trained. If you compared side-by-side two states with different drivers license requirements, then the state with more requirements or more training would presumably have less car accidents.

Likewise, if we compared side-by-side two cities with different populations or different population densities, then the city with more people in less space would likely have more car accidents. So, there are obvious ways to make travel by both car and plane safer. It is simple. Increase operator training and decrease the density of cars or planes on a given path. In other words, if we were to…