Story Wednesday September 26, 2018

[ijuin 572]

8 hours ago, hkmaly said:

... not that automobile traffic deaths are not reported. I think the reason is different here: people are afraid of airliner crash because they are not driving it. In car, when driving, they are under illusion that their superior driving ability can save them from collision (which is generally incorrect for two reasons: first, they don't have superior driving ability, second, even if they would have, there are plenty of crashes where it wouldn't help them).

Well I meant that each and every separate airplane crash is reported as an individual news item, while car crashes are not. You hear about every single airplane crash in detail, while you tend to hear only about local car crashes unless a celebrity is involved, meaning that most car crashes are merely statistics, emotionally speaking. You know in your head that fifty thousand Americans died this year in their own cars, but it doesn't "feel" like it's a hundred times more than the number of Americans who died in airliners, due to the differences in media coverage.

[hkmaly 490]

3 minutes ago, ijuin said:

8 hours ago, hkmaly said:

... not that automobile traffic deaths are not reported. I think the reason is different here: people are afraid of airliner crash because they are not driving it. In car, when driving, they are under illusion that their superior driving ability can save them from collision (which is generally incorrect for two reasons: first, they don't have superior driving ability, second, even if they would have, there are plenty of crashes where it wouldn't help them).

Well I meant that each and every separate airplane crash is reported as an individual news item, while car crashes are not. You hear about every single airplane crash in detail, while you tend to hear only about local car crashes unless a celebrity is involved, meaning that most car crashes are merely statistics, emotionally speaking. You know in your head that fifty thousand Americans died this year in their own cars, but it doesn't "feel" like it's a hundred times more than the number of Americans who died in airliners, due to the differences in media coverage.

While it rarely gets to same level of detail as airplane crashes, the "local" may be quite loosely interpreted. It might be close, it might involve celebrity (and there is LOT of celebrities), it might be far but involve someone local (there are plenty of news on topic of "coach with local people crashed in definitely nonlocal place"), it might be considered exceptional for some reason ... or there is cucumber season and they didn't found any other news.

Even with usually bigger number of causalities in airplane crashes, I would expect the number of reported deaths from airplane crashes and number of reported deaths from car crashes will be similar.

... which will still create incorrect perspective, true, because the actual number of deaths are not similar but with car crash deaths being much bigger.

[ijuin 572]

That would be exactly the problem that I was illustrating--that the relative media coverage between airplane crashes and automobile crashes tends to skew our perception of the actual death tolls towards overestimating air deaths and underestimating car deaths.

[Haylo 57]

Part of the difference might be the question of what to do with the information -- airlines and pilots in particular can be made to spend most of their working lives doing all sorts of things to incrementally improve flight safety, but making nearly the entire population do that is so unpalatable that the obvious conclusions from the number of traffic deaths don't attract much readership.

[Don Edwards 548]

On 9/27/2018 at 10:38 PM, ijuin said:

This is because we hear about literally every airliner crash in the whole world (less than a dozen per year!) and not the half-million automobile traffic deaths (even though automobile traffic collisions are the number one cause of accidental death).

In fairness, though, an automobile crash killing >100 people is rather less common than an airliner crash killing >100 people.

[hkmaly 490]

1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

On 9/28/2018 at 6:38 AM, ijuin said:

This is because we hear about literally every airliner crash in the whole world (less than a dozen per year!) and not the half-million automobile traffic deaths (even though automobile traffic collisions are the number one cause of accidental death).

In fairness, though, an automobile crash killing >100 people is rather less common than an airliner crash killing >100 people.

And, as I already mentioned, those tend to be reported. (Ok, seems there was no traffic accident killing > 100 people, but incidents involving over 100 cars with over 100 injured are likely to be reported even if number of people killed is smaller. Example, 29 November 1991 Interstate 5 in Coalinga, California.)

9 hours ago, Haylo said:

Part of the difference might be the question of what to do with the information -- airlines and pilots in particular can be made to spend most of their working lives doing all sorts of things to incrementally improve flight safety, but making nearly the entire population do that is so unpalatable that the obvious conclusions from the number of traffic deaths don't attract much readership.

It could be argued that professional drivers - for busses and truckers - should done the same as pilots. But yeah most traffic accidents are caused by people in cars who are not professional drivers. Also, again, traffic accidents of truckers are more likely to be reported, at least if they involve blocking some important highway for considerable time (which they often do).