Is flying safer than driving?
Between 2003 and 2023, air travel recorded 675 serious injuries, compared with over 47 million injuries in passenger vehicles on US highways.
Is it safer to travel the US by plane than by car? Yes, according to Department of Transportation (DOT) data. Stats tracked for the last 20–years show that people were less likely to be hurt or killed each year while flying than riding in passenger cars and trucks. Flying is also safer than riding subways, trains, buses, or motorcycles.
What is the safest way to travel?
Air travel is the nation’s safest form of transit. Injury and death rates in US air travel are measured by the rate of incidents per 100 million passenger miles, the total miles traveled by all air passengers. Since 2002, the rates have been almost zero, and the yearly number of aviation accidents declined.
In 2023, 33 plane passengers were injured over 773 billion miles of air travel. Put another way, you could circle the globe over 940,000 times for every one airplane injury.
What type of travel causes the most injuries?
From 2003 to 2023, there were a total of 675 serious injuries during domestic air travel, an average of 32 per year. Over 47 million people were hurt in passenger vehicles on US highways in the same span — approximately 2.2 million per year.
In 2023, passengers in cars and trucks were injured at a rate of 42.2 per 100 million miles traveled. Plane passengers? Just 0.004 per 100 million miles.
The most dangerous way to travel was via motorcycle; motorcyclists were injured at a rate of 399.0 per 100 million miles, more than six times the rate of any other form of transportation.
Motorcyclists are injured nearly 7 times more than any other travelers.
Passenger injury rates per 100 million passenger miles, 2023
What type of travel causes the most deaths?
From 2003 to 2023, a total of 787 people died during US air travel, including 20 in 2023. The bulk of those happened on smaller aircraft: 23% of the deaths occurred during scheduled commercial flights and 72% involved on-demand air taxis, which are small planes of 10 seats or fewer.
Passenger car and truck accidents accounted for 543,479 deaths on highways during the same time, for an average of 25,880 fatalities per year.
Air travel fatality rates are near zero.
Passenger fatality rates per 100 million passenger miles, 2023
The 2023 death rate for air passengers was 0.003 deaths per 100 million miles. The rate for car and truck passengers was 0.53. The highest rate of fatalities was via motorcycle, which had a rate of 30.6.
How safe is highway driving?
About 1.99 million people were injured in car and truck accidents on US highways in 2023. Another 82,564 were hurt in motorcycle crashes, which have the highest per-mile injury rate of any form of transportation.
Injury rates per 100 million passenger miles in cars and trucks dropped from more than 54 in 2016 to 42 in 2023. Motorcycle injury rates also dipped, down 440 per 100 million miles to 399. This could partially be due to the National Roadway Safety Strategy, which the Department of Transportation developed in 2022 to encourage responsible driving, better roadway design, safer vehicle design, less speeding, and increased access to emergency responses.
Injuries and fatalities are more frequent and trending upward for motorcycles.
Passenger injury and fatality rates per 100 million passenger miles, by vehicle type, 2013–2023
Highway fatality rates, on the other hand, have risen in the last decade-plus. Deaths in car and truck accidents reached 0.53 per 100 million miles in 2023, which was the fourth consecutive year the rate was over 0.5. In 2023, the motorcycle fatality rate was 30.6, the highest it’s been since 2006.
How safe is public transit?
Public buses and trains (including subways and streetcars) accounted for 8,298 passenger injuries and 37 fatalities in 2024, the most recent year of data.
Buses had 90% of public transit passenger injuries in 2024 but only 32% of transit deaths, while trains had the rest.
Injuries occurred at rates of 54.3 per 100 million miles on buses and 6.4 on trains. Fatalities were 0.09 on buses and 0.19 on trains in 2024.
How safe is passenger railroad travel?
Passenger rail includes commuter rail and Amtrak. In 2023, there were 625 injuries and one fatality on passenger railroad services. That’s a rate of 4.9 for injuries and 0.01 for fatalities.
Railroad injuries reached a high in 2016 before falling nearly two-thirds by 2023. Over the same period, miles traveled by rail fell 30%.
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Page sources
Bureau of Transportation Statistics
Injured Persons by Transportation Mode
Bureau of Transportation Statistics
National Transportation Statistics
