> driving short trips would have to be more dangerous per mile than driving long trips. I think this is unlikely to be true.
I would be shocked to find that short trips were safer (per-mile) than long trips, as my intuition is that interstate highways are likely to be by far the safest type of roadway on a per-mile basis.
So I did some digging. It was surprisingly hard to find data that broke it down by roadway type, but I eventually found an article[1] that also linked to data[2].
Taking the most recent year available [2004], and converting to the typical airline standard (deaths per 10 billion miles travelled), urban interstates have a death rate of 57 deaths/10Bmi, urban collector roads 85 deaths/10Bmi, urban local roads 128 d/10Bmi, and rural local roads 315 d/10Bmi.
Airline figures for comparison are about 0.2 deaths per 10Bmi for scheduled commercial airline travel (Delta, United, Southwest, American, etc; not charter, not corporate, not general aviation), yet people are much more fearful of airplanes than automobiles on average.
I would be shocked to find that short trips were safer (per-mile) than long trips, as my intuition is that interstate highways are likely to be by far the safest type of roadway on a per-mile basis.
So I did some digging. It was surprisingly hard to find data that broke it down by roadway type, but I eventually found an article[1] that also linked to data[2].
Taking the most recent year available [2004], and converting to the typical airline standard (deaths per 10 billion miles travelled), urban interstates have a death rate of 57 deaths/10Bmi, urban collector roads 85 deaths/10Bmi, urban local roads 128 d/10Bmi, and rural local roads 315 d/10Bmi.
Airline figures for comparison are about 0.2 deaths per 10Bmi for scheduled commercial airline travel (Delta, United, Southwest, American, etc; not charter, not corporate, not general aviation), yet people are much more fearful of airplanes than automobiles on average.
[1] - http://freakonomics.com/2010/01/29/the-irony-of-road-fear/
[2] - https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/national_transporta...