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It has to do with fears and responsability. If someone dies on a car accident, 99.99% of the time, people will blame the driver or another driver.
If a plane crashes it hits the news big due to the quantity of corpses and the blame goes through a pipeline splashing everyone from pilots to the dudes adjusting bolts and ultimately hits public fear on flying, which could potebtially kill the industry.
Commercial planes you mean. Private planes come down from time to time and they don’t get as much coverage. Even with this, commercial planes come down so rarely that usually it’s a technical error and not the fault of the pilots.
Few cars crash because if technical error, it’s more driver error.
They usually don’t let 18yo (or younger) drunk people fly after just a short license course.
They also don’t let 95yo semi-blind people fly.
And road ragers are also rarely allowed to pilot a commercial plane.
Auto industry spends over $12 billion per year just within the US. That money is to buy positive news coverage, which is why the media will never describe driving as being inherently unsafe.
When a plane crashes investigators try to find the causes to make recommendations on how to make things safer. When a car crashes the investigation is not about safety, its about assigning blame.
This is the reason that aviation is as safe as it is, and cars are as dangerous as they are. Investigate car crashes the same way, and change licensing, training, vehicles, and infrastructure in response to those findings, and cars can be safe.
There is no such thing as an accident. Every collision is avoidable.
Also, there’s no fear of revoking pilot licenses. If someone behaves stupidly while piloting a plane, they won’t pilot a commercial plane again.
If someone behaves stupidly behind the wheel, usually nothing happens, and only rarely will someone get their license suspended for a limited amount of time.
Piloting a plane is not a right but a priviledge, and driving a car should be seend the same way.
Not defending cars at all but plane accidents usually have higher casualties. The total number is still way higher with cars but planes are more shocking because they have way stricter regulations.
so…
maybe cars also need stricter regulations?
They do. Especially in the US where cars that are barely held together are allowed on the roads and getting a driver licence is easy as cake.
The safety testing is a problem because they often test vehicles solely against other vehicles in their class. Meaning a 5 star safety rating on a small car is only 5 stars against another small car. Against the suburban down the street it’d be illegal to produce them for the safety violations.
I would happily resubmit to the driver exam every five years if that were the norm. It would remove or reform sooo many dangerous drivers. I think regular retesting is also superior to only retesting elderly drivers, because it’s a level mechanism for everyone that avoids ageism. Lots of younger and middle age drivers are menaces, too. It’s less about prohibiting them from vehicle use, more about making sure they’re actually ready for that use.
I’d be up for a 10 year resubmit and then after you are older than 70 it keeps decreasing. No issue retaking it as long as it’s just like a theory and maybe an hour or 2 on the road with a driving instructor and it’s not as expensive as doing it the first time. (20+ mandatory instructor hours don’t come cheap).
Considering how many people don’t know the basics in regards to driving law (e.g. under what circumstances you are allowed to use the horn, driving only so fast that you can stop before any danger that you can presently not see, parking rules, …), I’d say 5 years is even too long of an interval, not too short of one.
The issue with it being less than 5 year IMO is that you would not have the capacity to test so many people so often.
Tbh, I don’t really see that as an issue.
There’s four potential parts to a license renewal:
- medical check
- theory test
- driving test
- submitting an up-to-date photo and printing the new license
In any civilized country, people have a yearly medical check (for health purposes) regardless, so you could just add the driver’s license check to that.
Theory tests can be done on a PC, so you don’t need a lot of humans to supervise. One should be enough for dozens of parallel tests just to make sure nobody is cheating.
The photo and printing part hardly takes any personell and can be outsourced super easily.
Leaves the actual driving test. In most countries the training required to become a driving examiner is really easy, often just a 1-3 month course. So it should be rather trivial to increase the capacity there. In my country there aren’t even any full-time employees doing driving exams, they are all part-time, because the amount of required employees for that job is so low.
I think it’s shocking how little regulations cars have
There’s a perceptional issue at work. Individual people aren’t in control of an airplane. They’re stuck in a metal tube going 500+ mph at 30k ft. They don’t have any agency over what happens. The industry combats this by having really, really tight regulations (well, they do until someone in the C-suite tries to fuck with it).
With a car, you’re in control. There’s a heavier emphasis on “personal responsibility”. When the truck with a 5’ hood hits a kid crossing the street, it’s the kid’s fault for not looking both ways. We have a bunch of stuff that tries to make things safer (mostly for the occupants), and a lot of it has made cars heavier, more expensive, and sometimes more dangerous for people outside the car.
This deserves a more in-depth writeup on the evolution of car safety equipment than I’m willing to do right now, but the conclusion should be that you can’t make cars work as a primary mass transit method. We’re over a century into cars being mass transit, and we haven’t really solved it, because we can’t.
Yeah, this is definitely not a good comparison, I agree. One argument maybe is that because planes are more regulated it works out at lower accident rate and that’s what we should bring to the car world. But there are also much much more cars than planes around.
And what metric you check: accidents per km or accidents per trip. Per trip airplanes are much higher, per km cars are higher.
*two airplane crashes
Reminds me of when some rich people wanted to see the Titanic and, well, went the way of the Titanic
Volume, the issue is volume. If there was 3 million planes flying around the same sky it would be another story, but also personal vs commercial. Commercial has standards they need to meet and investigations need to take place when things go wrong. If you fuck up your own shit, who cares but you and the other people involved?!
Come on, full self driving is 1000x safer!!! /s
