Are trains the safest way to travel? (2023)

Are trains the safest way to travel?

Compared to other popular forms of travel, such as cars, ships, buses, and planes, trains are one of the safest forms of transportation in the United States. That's because trains have an excellent safety record!

Air travel resulted in 0.07 deaths for every 1 billion miles travelled compared to 212.57 for motorcycles and 7.28 for cars.

Just as it does with air, car, bus and other means of transport. Even so, statistics are clear – officially, the train is one of the safest modes of transportation these days! The same level of safety goes for air traffic while all other means of transport come after.

Conclusions. Commercial flights are the safest transport mode. In the past decade, there hasn't been a single full plane crash in the US. The fatalities rate during this past decade so low that even if you fly your during your entire life, you only have 1 out of 1,500 chances of dying.

Sit in the center-most train car

When choosing a seat on a train, try to get one in the center-most car, or one of the central cars. This will put you as far as possible from the most common points of issue for collisions or derailment, namely the front and end of the train.

Plane. There's a 1 in 9,821 chance of dying in the air – making it one of the safest modes of transport.

Aviation is the safest form of long distance transport.

Today, according to the Dutch aviation consulting firm To70, commercial passenger jets see just one fatal accident for every 16 million flights. To put that in perspective, for every 1 billion passenger miles traveled by car, 7.2 people die; by plane, it's 0.07 people.

Safety experts recommend rear-facing seats because passengers will be pushed into their seats instead of thrown forward, resulting in less injuries.

What is the best mode of travel?

Airplanes get you places fast and are the most versatile mode of transportation, taking you across states, across countries, and across waters.

Safety. Both modes of transportation, flying, and sailing, are statistically considered safe methods of overseas travel. When talking about statistics, airplane accidents average one in 1.6 million flights per year. Cruise ships, however, have a much fewer number of accidents per year.

Compared to airplanes, trains are far more spacious. The seats are wider (and often more comfortable) plus there's a lot more leg room. Many trains have seats that face each other with a table in the middle.

Here's how that breaks down by mode of transportation: Air: 349 deaths. Railroad: 746 deaths. Highway: 38,824 deaths.

While fatalities from train derailments are rare, derailments themselves are actually quite common. From 1990, the first year the BTS began tracking derailments and injuries on a yearly basis, to 2021, there have been 54,539 accidents in which a train derailed. That's an average of 1,704 derailments per year.

High Speed Rail is the world's safest form of transportation proven by decades of operations all around the world. Japan was the first nation to build high speed rail in 1964, and has since transported 10 billion passengers without a single injury or fatality!

Rail and waterborne transport have the lowest emissions per kilometre and unit transported, while aviation and road transport emit significantly more.

Which side of plane is safer?

Statistics provided by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) support this finding. According to their stats, the back third of the plane had the lowest fatality rate whilst the highest fatality rate was found at the aisles in the middle section.