Summary
A new AP-NORC poll shows that Americans’ confidence in air travel has declined after several fatal plane crashes in 2025.
Only 64% now believe flying is safe, down from 71% last year, while the number of those who feel it is unsafe rose by 12%.
Confidence in pilots, air traffic controllers, and the federal government has also dropped. Recent crashes, including a deadly collision over Washington, D.C., have fueled public concern.
Meanwhile, Trump has begun firing hundreds of FAA employees, raising further safety worries.
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.