xkcd #2940: Modes of Transportation
Title Text:
My bold criticism might anger the hot air balloon people, which would be a real concern if any of them lived along a very narrow line directly upwind of me.
alt-text:
A chart that categorizes various modes of transportation based on their practicality and danger level:
Zone of Practicality:
- Trains
- Airliners
- Boats
- Walking
- Cars
- Scooters
- Bicycles
Zone of Specialty and Recreational Vehicles:
- Motorcycles
- Helicopters
- Light aircraft
- Go karts
- Skateboards
- Rollerblades
- Skis
- Unicycles
- Sleds
- Bumper cars
???:
- Hot air balloons
“Hot air balloons are the optimal mode of transportation, if your optimization algorithm has a sign error.”
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The placement of „Skis“ in this will trigger every Scandinavian I know. Should definitely be in the top left.
Even us close to Scandinavia get triggered. There aren’t that many practical ways to get around at winter. Skis work when feet don’t.
In Canada too. It’s not that common, but also not out of place to see people doing their regular commute on skis.
Unicycles are clearly more dangerous than skis.
Scandinavia is their zone of specialty
Trust you on that but will ski across the pond to check and be sure
I’m from the Scandinavian country WITHOUT mountains and with less snow and am as such not triggered.
You don’t know me, though, so I guess your statement might still hold true 😁
What about pogo sticks?
Airliners should be below boats for convenience 😂 just because of airport security and bag collection…
Airplane least convenient for travel from bedroom to kitchen
Walking least convenient for travel to Antarctica
Iduno, travelling to Antarctica might be more difficult with skis than walking 😂
where to put my 3 favorites? hovercraft, monorail and blimp
Those first two are incredibly fit for some niche that is so small that nobody even remembers it exists.
The last one is still more practical than hot air balloons.
I watched a documentary once about the dangers of monorails. The conductor had possums in the wiring. He called the big one Bitey.
Randall is offically carpilled
Motorcycles should be replaced with EUCs.
Are hot air balloon not like super safe, last accident I think was a guy that made his own DIY hot air balloon but before that it has been relatively safe. I think America has only seen like less than 800 deaths total.
If the comic put in zeppelins…
You’d need to normalize the number to deaths per balloon ride.
Only three people died last year playing Russian Roulette, must be pretty safe! /s
Bicycles more dangerous than cars? I guess I must have missed all the stories about people being run over by bikes.
I think it means more dangerous to use, not more dangerous to be around.
Unless you have pepper infrastructure.
Edit: sorry that’s not true, see this from the Netherlands:
Voor het vierde jaar op rij kwamen meer fietsers (270; 39%) dan inzittenden van personenauto’s (194; 28%) om in het verkeer. De meeste doden in het verkeer vallen onder ouderen: in 2023 waren 375 (55%) verkeersdoden 60 jaar of ouder. Kinderen (0-14 jaar) komen juist relatief weinig om in het verkeer; in 2023 waren dat er 20 (3%). Het risico om te overlijden in het verkeer, het aantal verkeersdoden per afgelegde kilometer, is het ho ogst voor gemotoriseerde tweewielers. Het risico voor brom- en snorfietsers en motorrijders is ongeveer dertig keer zo hoog als het risico voor inzittenden van een personenauto. Voor fietsers en voetgangers is het overlijdensrisico respectievelijk acht en zes keer zo hoog als voor auto-inzittenden, in de periode 2012-2021.
Translation:
For the fourth year in a row, more cyclists (270; 39%) than passenger car occupants (194; 28%) were killed in traffic. Most traffic fatalities occur among the elderly: in 2023, 375 (55%) traffic fatalities were 60 years or older. Children (0-14 years) are relatively rarely killed in traffic; in 2023 there were 20 (3%). The risk of dying in traffic, the number of traffic fatalities per kilometer travelled, is highest for motorized two-wheelers. The risk for moped and light-moped riders and motorcyclists is approximately thirty times higher than the risk for passenger car occupants. For cyclists and pedestrians, the risk of death is eight and six times higher, respectively, than for car occupants, in the period 2012-2021.
Also, bikes more dangerous than unicycles?
I’ve never seen some ride a unicyle on a road in regular traffic, which is where most of the danger of riding a bike is.
Do those electric unicycles without a seat count? Because those are weaving through traffic at insane speeds all the time where I live.
Oh wow, never seen one of these. No idea.
Bike on pedestrian violence is an epidemic!
I see what you mean about net safety and not just thinking about the operator of the mode of transport. Will look into this later.
Trains, scooters and/ motorcycles are convenient for travel? I mean sure, if you never carry anything anywhere and/or you love how every other person in the world smells after they finish their 12 hour shift of breaking big rocks with smaller rocks.
Where would horses go?
Not sure I’d put unicycles as being safer than bicycles.
There are basically no unsafe ways to get off of a unicycle. You can fall in any direction and just end up standing next to your unicycle. Compare that to a bicycle “over the handle bars”-accident.
It’s probably there because you don’t reach as high speeds on a unicycle
I’d guess it’s because unicycles are used in a much narrower range of circumstances. Few people are being hit by cars commuting to work on a unicycle, nor are there many mountain-unicyclists getting injured.
Which honestly just speaks for the insane amount of training mountain-unicyclists have done
You joke (I think?), but the people I know that do unicycling (including mountain-bike style unicycling, and unicycling Himalayan trails, and crazy stuff like that) do do an insane amount of training 😆
You’d have to. Anyone who mountain bikes regularly knows how much work it is to climb some trails with 500% gear range. I can’t imagine the work involved with a single gear to climb on some trails. Brutal.
I was joking, but i guess now i know what im gonna watch on youtube next
This is wildly dependent on infrastructure. Both for the convenience and danger axis.
motorcycles should 100% be in the zone of practicality, especially with modern sleek electric ones.
skateboards should be the bridge between practical and recreational, provided you have sensible infrastructure and short distances they have distinct benefits.
skis and sleds just need snow to make sense
I think the existence of car drivers increases their danger level massively
sure but that applies to everything, if you want to be safe then the only time you should ever be on a road is inside a bus.
Apparently alcohol as well as it is involved in something like 50% of motorcycle fatalities.
it annoys me to no end how motorcycles and mopeds are viewed as dangerous, when every single time you hear about people being hurt on them it’s because they’re fucking idiots who tried to do a backflip infront of a semitruck
Horses are technically more dangerous to ride than motorcycles. It’s just that motorcycles attract a kind of people who like doing backflips in front of a semi truck.
You can be a skilled rider and still and a fall. More likely is that an unsafe car driver will do something that causes an accident.
I’m here to say that if there’s snow, skis win on practicality. Almost every winter, there’s at least one day when you will have some people skiing to work in Oslo, a city of 700 000 inhabitants, with a metro system. Because when there’s 10 cm of snow in the streets, skis are the quickest and easiest way to get anywhere.
But hardly for hot air balloons
Yeah, the joke and alt text are delivered quite nicely.
It took me too fucking long to figure out what an “airuner” was…
The fact that airplane travel is safer than cars is a myth invented to promote airplane travel. Well, it is not fully a myth, but to get to that result they measure per mile, and that greatly favor airplane travel. If you instead measure how likely you are to die on your next trip, then the dangers of airplane travel will significantly exceed car travel and other means of transportation.
What’s the benefit of measuring per trip versus per passenger mile?
Per trip is more in line with how people think about danger. Like, am I going to die on this trip?
I would think real statistics would be more interesting then peoples emotions when talking about what is actually dangerous.
And the question is am I going to die on this trip? And there the real statistics are pretty clear, cars are safer.
This is complete horseshit.
Are you aware how many flights take place every day?
Vs
How many fatal accidents pr flight?
The fact is that almost every time a fatal accident happens in a (commercial) plane anywhere in the world, you hear about it. Because if a plane crashes a lot of people die in one dramatic (and rare) event.
Fatal car accidents litteraly happen every minute of every day. Almost none of them go on the news. (Cause reporting them all would be impossible).
Let me also post some sources, since you did not:
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/
https://www.icao.int/safety/iStars/Pages/Accident-Statistics.aspx/ Air traffic: (3187 fatalities over 10 years)
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries (1.19 million people every year die on the road)
I think you underestimate the number of trips per car per day. Most people will take more trips by car per month than they will fly for their lifetime. In Sweden , a country of 10 million, we have about 150 people killed per year from car accidents, yet most adults travel by car daily. That is millions of trips per day, and only half a death.
Sweden , a country of 10 million, we have about 150 people killed per year from car accidents
Yes, and how many die every year from plane crashes in sweden?
If we take a relatively big plane (450 passengers) as an example. One has to fall out of the sky every 3. Years to match the car accident number…
3186 deaths over 10 years VS 1.19 million every year.
(This is globally. Sweden and Norway(where i live) will naturally have pretty radically lower numbers then globally when it comes to road safety.)
But look at that air travel number again: 3186. Over 10 years. Globally. Commercial Air travel is fucking safe. Its horrible for the climate. But its safe.
Whatever way you slice those numbers it comes up air travel i safer. Feel free to find actual statistics that contradict me. :)
Just check the stats https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comparisons
From your own source:
Since 1997, the number of fatal air accidents has been no more than 1 for every 2,000,000,000 person-miles[c] flown,[citation needed] and thus is one of the safest modes of transportation when measured by distance traveled.
So I guess this is the point you are trying to make?
You can argue that “per person miles” is a better metric, but that is completely orthogonal to their initial claim.
Well, what I want to know is “Am I going to die today?”. The distance traveled is irrelevant to answer that question. The only reason to add that to the equation is to make air travel look safer.
I honestly think you are showing a fundamental lack of understanding of statistics.
“Per trip” is a horribly poor metric. Because there is a fundamental difference between a trip down to the store, or a cross country trip, even with a car. Also it would be extremely dependent on where you are going, where you live etc. etc.
For the discussion to have any meaning you have to abstract it to a metric that makes sense for all people, or else you would have to also figure in where you usually travel, how good a driver you are etc etc etc.
At that point its a completely meaningless semantics exercise because for instance taking a plane to work is not realy valid for me since i live in the same city as i work… Or lets do it the other way around: If i need to go to Spain tomorrow, its safer for me to fly then to drive there. (This is based on your own sources)
Very interesting 🤔
And your point about metrics is pretty spot on.
In the end it becomes an exercise in trying to find the metric that best supports your argument.
We have also been jumping around a bit on geographical limitations. And in for instance Scandinavia, the original premise might be closer to real due to better road safety.
I think implying some sort of myth or ruse is missing the mark hard on this subject.
I think I get what the guy is trying to say. Per journey, air travel might indeed end up being statistically less safe (how many times a year an average person flies vs. how many times they drive their car) but of course the question is whether that particular metric is any useful. Surely if you replaced all airplane trips with car trips, more people would die.
This Wikipedia article contains a table, which if true, confirms it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comparisons
If you sort it by Journeys, you’ll find that 117 people die in an airplane per billion journeys, while only 40 die per billion car journeys. But the article points out exactly what I said before.
Funny example that illustrates how important the choice of metric is, is the Space Shuttle which is statistically incredibly unsafe per journey (17,000,000 deaths per billion journeys) and even per hours (only skydiving coming first by a small margin) but is safer than bicycles and only twice less safe than cars per distance traveled because of those insane distances it covers in orbit.
Edit: Not that I do not know whether the table counts only commercial flights or all airplane/helicopter journeys. And also the statistics is pretty old (1990-2000) and only covers the UK, so you may still be right and commercial air travel in the last decade might be safer per journey than cars globally. Can’t find a better statistics.
why are scooters practical and motorcycles not? I only ride a motorcycle. any distance too long for bycicle or inconvenient with public transit, I take my motorcycle.
The graph does say its practical, its just also more dangerous than a scooter
Edit: oh you meant in the zone of practicality, not the y axis convenient for travel. The zoning i feel is pretty subjective
