Rethinking Our Views On Transportation Deaths

Twice this year a Malaysian Aircraft has gone down, killing all the passengers and crew. All told we lost 510 people - a real tragedy. There has been intense media coverage of both downed flights, and understandably so:

• Each event had hundreds of people die at once.
• Death by plane crash is horrific in nature - you have no control and there is no escape.
• There are intriguing unanswered questions in each case. Did Flight 370 really go down? Who shot down Flight 17?
• Traveling on a plane is statistically the safest form of transportation in terms of passenger deaths per mile - making incidents like this all the more noteworthy.
• Residual memories of 9/11, and how planes were used as instruments of terror
• A flailing network desperate for ratings

This coverage by the media has lead to a robust public discussion surrounding plane crashes and how to prevent them. Families are shown grieving, scientists and engineers are offering technical solutions, and politicians are discussing policy changes, and even economic sanctions in the case of Flight 17. As a society, we are at least taking this issue seriously, and debating ways to fix any problems that lead to the deaths of 510 people. This is all good, this is what we should be doing.

However, it seems that we are limited to figuring things like this out only during times of crisis. Let’s narrow this discussion just to issues of transportation safety as an example.

In the 131 days in between these two plane crashes approximately 12,000 people in the United States died in car crashes^[1]. This is 24 times the number of people who died on the two Malaysian Airlines flights during the same period of time. Yet, this is just business as usual, and there is barely any public discussion about how to fix it.

Since the automobile was invented over 3.5 million people have had their lives cut short due to car crashes in the United States alone^[2], including over a million just in my lifetime^[3]. How is it that we’ve come to just accept so many transportation related deaths year in, year out? Why do we only pay attention during abnormal and horrific incidents like these two plane crashes?

In the movie The Dark Knight, The Joker brilliantly critiques our culture’s normalization of horrific but regularly occurring events, “Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan.’ Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all ‘part of the plan.’ But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos.”

Perhaps it’s just human nature for us all to collectively gawk at the two downed flights. However, that does not excuse our inability to address our long term problems that are actually hurting us more.

Going back to the ongoing and slow burning car crash crisis - there are many things that we can do to stop it. Tesla has built a car so safe that it broke the NHTSA safety gear. We should make that level of car safety the floor for new vehicles. Google is pioneering the way for driverless cars, but they only have a charter to operate four states now^[4]. We should make driverless cars legal in all 50 states, and start a public discussion about liability issues that are sure to crop up down the line. Drones, once used as weapons of war, are being repurposed by Amazon as a new way to delivering packages without the need of a truck. The FAA should make this legal, instead of perpetually studying the issue.

We can’t sit around and wait for these problems to solve themselves - business as usual is just too deadly to continue. Every three days we lose the equivalent of plane full of people in car crashes. This has to stop. We need to stop accepting this as normal, and start demanding that our leaders formulate solutions for them.

^{1. Most recent data is 33,561 total deaths in 2012, assuming even distribution over the course of the year (131/365)*33,561=12,045 source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ListofmotorvehicledeathsinU.S.byyear↩}

^{2. 3,581,039 people from 1899-2012 source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ListofmotorvehicledeathsinU.S.byyear↩}

^{3. 1,154,995 people from 1985 - 2012 source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ListofmotorvehicledeathsinU.S.byyear↩}

^{4. Nevada, Florida, California, Michigan source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car↩}