Wednesday 13 August 2014

World Road Fatalities

Hello everyone,

In the wake of the recent air disasters that had unfortunately befallen one of the best airlines in the world. Some of us couldn't help but wonder whether it is still safe to air travel?

Sentiment towards the Malaysian Airlines have grown increasingly negative since MH17, especially from foreigners. Having huge reputation as one of the best airlines in the world also did not help in staving off detractors. MAS has taken such a huge toll that recently, it had a massive reshuffling under its new owner, Khazanah Nasional Berhad.

However, we should be practical in judging and reacting towards the sentiment. Let's look at a few details:

1. MH17 was shot down - there's nothing anyone could do about it.

2. MH370 was a very rare occurrence - If we acknowledge the conpiracy theorists, How many airlines pilots in Malaysia is that geeky to have his own Flight Simulator at home? I bet you know the answer.

3. Forget air disasters, people die from traffic related accidents a hundred-fold compared to a plane crashing. You should be more afraid to drive your car, or take a bus!!

So you see, sentiments aside, Air travel is still the safest way to travel by far, and condemning a particular airline for something unprecedented that had happened to them is too cruel. Mas is a victim, just like the lives that was lost. We pay our respect to the deceased.

Now to ponder furthermore, below is a Viz detailing traffic related fatalities as of 2013. As I said, when entering a car, you should be very afraid  :). The green represent the least number of fatalities, and Red represent the most. The bubbles are the rate of fatal accidents occurring per a subset of population. Color represents  the number of traffic fatalites per 100,000 people. And the size of the bubble, represent the number of fatalities per 100,000 vehicles. When you look at it, it makes sense that China and India, even though they do have the biggest total number of fatalities due to their population count. They are one of the moderates in fatalities per 100k of vehicles and population. This is most probably due to the number of population who could not afford to buy their own vehicles. I'm just surprised to see Africa leading the number of deaths per 100k vehicle. Does this mean that they have too much cars that even a baboon can go around driving? 



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