"The reporter speculated that this was caused by the "very warm winter across the country," causing people to drive more."

But it is expressed as a rate. If people drive more the denominator increases, which is also a problem for your thesis.

It could be. It also depends on how long of a drive it is. I fly in/out of small/tiny airports for the most part, and so far no one has tried to touch my junk and the expensive pr0n-scanners aren't around.

But the cost of the trip I take to see my mom is between $400 and $500, and depending on when, and how far in advance I buy tickets. If I drive, It's a 16 hour trip, 900 or so miles one-way. Ballpark, that's about 70 gallons of gas, $200-$300 just for the round trip, and two days and a room each way. But I can take as many bags as I like... ;-)

I've done it straight thru, but that's a rough, rough thing to do. I'm generally worthless after that until I can get a solid stretch of sleep. And when I did that, I was a much younger man. Not sure I could do it now.

I drive through to Mamalady's house about 900mi. through some very picturesque country... I could fly SWA for about the same price, but this way I have my car w/ me, take side trips if I like, and am generally happier than if I fly.

Also, there's that side trip to San Diego and it's comics geekout. In short, for total flexability and seeing the USA, it's my Chev... er canadian built Honda.

My son drives about 7 hours to get here. My husband wanted me to look into what it would take for us to go visit him. Turns out it would cost half the price or less to drive as it would to get us both airplane tickets. We could drive an hour, fly to Dallas, then to his town. We could also drive 5 hours to Dallas then fly to his town. Seems even worse.

I figure the time for security and all that and the layover plus the flight times would probably take about the same amount of time as driving, if not more. Plus, if we drive all the way we have a car while we're there.

I was looking at taking a trip to CA last spring. I was looking at trains and buses instead of planes, but I ended up not going.

A co-worker was saying today that his brother went so far as to get a pilot license and purchase a plane to avoid flying commercial.

It's a wash for me to travel alone from Colorado to Michigan, but I drive now because my mom is 73 and can't do a lot of stuff around the house. I show up about once a year with a tool box and she gives me her "list".

Some days I regret being the son my father never had, but she really gets a kick out of the fact I can replace light fixtures, faucets, paint, patch, etc.

Eh. It makes her happy. She's worth it.

Now, I don't have all the data, nor do I know if they actually tried to run any statistical tests to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the two years in question. However...

Let's look a little closer at what they say.

They say the rate increased by 13.5 percent. That sounds big and scarey. They neglect to mention that the units are SOOO tiny that just to get a decimal-sized number, they had to use a rate per hundred-million miles. When is the last time you drove a million miles, let alone a hundred million???

Moreover, the rate was tiny and went up. It went up by 0.12 per hundred million miles. In slightly more graspable units, that is 0.0012 MORE per MILLION miles.

Doesn't that sound a lot less frightening than "it went up by 13.5%?" If something tiny goes up a little, it probably went up a big percent.

A more concrete example: Say you used to buy M&Ms at the checkout for 65 cents in 2011. Now they're 75 cents. Not a huge change, but it's a 15% increase!

Our company closed out our developer's office in Washington state. I was forced to fly -- that was the second time in three years and a total of five round trips since 9/11.

I've done my best to be polite, courteous and accepting on nine of the ten flights. The last one, coming home, just hit my "Hell No!" button. I asked for a 10ML bottle of labeled, medical, liquid to be hand scanned instead of X-rayed.

For that I had to do a metal detector, porno scan and a pat-down. Then add to that the fucking TSA showed up at the gate to fucking double check our ID matched the boarding passes as we were boarding. If I'm past the TSA in the sterile area, why isn't that the responsibility of the airlines?

I refuse to fly again until the TSA is gone.

smurfy: "But it is expressed as a rate. If people drive more the denominator increases..."

Actually the numerator, but smurfy has an interesting point.

The total number of deaths for the first three months of 2012 was 13.5% higher than the same period in 2011.

The number of deaths per 100 Million miles of driving increased from .98 to 1.1. That's a 12.24% increase in the rate.

Since the rate increased from .98 to 1.1, the total number of deaths would have increased by 12.24% without any increase in driving.

So only 1.26 of the 13.5% increase in deaths can be attributed to an increase in driving (because 12.24% is explained by the increase in the rate). And that much of an increase in the number of deaths would require only about 1.15% increase in driving in 2012 over 2011 (since the higher 1.1 rate would apply to 2012).

How in the hell would NHTSA get any kind of reasonably accurate idea of how many hundreds of millions of miles Americans drive? I doubt they have any better idea about how much Americans' drive than TSA has about what a terrorist looks like.

The number of fatalities should be on a steady decline. Especially currently.

The number of unemployed has been higher in the last two-three years, so that is fewer daily drivers. Then throw in that you can not really find a vehicle for sale anymore that doesn't have an airbag.

I know I vented my spleen above but when you get down to brass tacks, always remember correlation does not imply causation.

It could just be due to how bad younger drivers are. There's more aggressive and dangerous driving on the highways from young people now than there was when I was younger.

I mean, yeah we drove like maniacs, but I don't remember the constant road-rage and driving up someone's ass on the highway all the time.

Also - there's more pretty girls wearing small skirts (no doubt due to global warming) and we, as men, just can't NOT look. We are compelled to look at women by our genes.

It's God's fault! Let's sue him.

Shannon and Ken: I've been looking at some data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. So far they only have data for January and February of this year. Over those two months, highway miles are up 10.4% from last year; air miles are up but only by 1%. As Ken points out, an increase in the fatality rate doesn't necessarily tell you anything about total miles traveled. As for the growth of highway miles vs. airline miles, the disparity is interesting. However, total highway miles traveled in 2011 declined, while total airline miles increased slightly, so it may be just that highway miles are catching back up. I don't see any trend in air travel that can't be explained by the economy. We'll know more when we have this year's data in hand at the end of the year.

As for how they estimate highway miles, I believe it's done by collecting statistics on fuel taxes paid, and on the number and types of vehicles registered.