Safety First

I came across this on Ambulance Driver's blog:

It’s a dangerous business, driving an ambulance. That’s one reason I don’t bristle much at being called an ambulance driver. According to NHTSA crash data, ambulances are involved in 3,200 crashes per hundred million miles traveled. That’s 4 times as often as motorcycles, 8 times as often as cars and light trucks, and 15 times as often as heavy trucks.

If ambulances crash 3,200 times, and that is 8 times as often as cars, then cars crash 400 times in a 100 million miles, or 4 times per million miles, or once every 250,000 miles. If you drive 12,000 miles a year, that's an average of one crash every 20 years. If you make an average of 4 trips a day in your car (1 to work, 1 back, 1 to the store, 1 to home), that means one accident every, um, 20 years times 365 days per year times 4 trips per day comes out to one chance in 30,000 of having a wreck each time you get in your car. That's pretty slim odds.

Now all I need is similar data for air travel and I can figure out whether it is safer to get in an airplane or a car.