I’m heading off to LAX later this week and was just looking at some air traffic safety statistics, out of curiosity. It’s really amazing the safety record of U.S.-based airlines when you compare them to the thousands of traffic fatalities that occur every year. I have a bit of a morbid streak so I always find these kinds of statistics quite fascinating. When you consider the thousands of flights that occur every day it’s amazing that this list of fatalities fits on one medium size web page. Of course, that’s not to diminish the horror and loss of these awful events – especially 9/11 and that awful crash in Belle Harbor, NY, a few months later in 2001.

But when you then look at highway fatalities, things are really crazy – 43,443 people dead on our highways in 2005 alone. That’s like 125 people every day. That’s a lot of people. With figures like that I sometimes wonder why I drive at all.