Self-driving cars have a big obstacle to success: your brain
Around the time of the recent Amtrack crash, Vox published an interesting piece called Cars kill more people. But there's a good reason train crashes seem scarier . Most of us are fully aware of the statistics: traveling by plane or train is much, much safer than travel by car. While fatal automobile accidents are not that common relative to the sheer volume of cars on the road, they're still far more common than deaths by plane or train — Vox puts it at 7.3 deaths per billion miles for driving, and just .43 and .07 for trains and planes, respectively. And yet we're more afraid of flying, and there are two reasons. The first is a cognitive bias: the availability heuristic . This is a tendency for us to overestimate the likelihood of events that are easily recalled and/or have a strong emotional component. When a plane crashes and 80 people die, it's big news that can get days or even weeks of coverage; but 80 people die on roadways every day, and we hear almost