Indeed I looked into it a little bit more and found that planes are about three orders or magnitude safer than cars [1] (fatality per miles traveled). So even assuming that the MAX is two orders of magnitude less safe than the 737 NG (based on limited data), it would still be an order of magnitude safer than traveling by car.
[1] I found 11 fatalities per trillion miles for planes, and 12.5 fatalities per billion miles for cars (in the US).
But how does travel per million miles make sense? Nobody decides to fly from Singapore to Sydney or drive. It's just not comparable.
It's hard to find a good statistic that would make modes of transport comparable. But if I'd pick one I'd pick time spent (are 10 hours on a plane more or less safe than 10 hours in a car)
Just considering safety, per trip is what I personally care about - the total odds I will die going by plane or by car. Often, this means flying through a hub which we would not visit by car so the numbers would be really hard :-/
Airplanes are faster than cars, and the average trip is longer. So, even if the pax fatality rate per distance is much better for aircraft (a factor of 200 to 1000, say), the fatality rate per trip is not that much better (a factor of 2 to 10, say).
Some more notes:
- That is for part 121 aviation (airlines). General aviation fatality rates are much worse (you're 15 times more likely to die in a small plane than in a car for the same distance, and 250 times more per trip...)
- An airliner also carries many more pax. The above numbers are per pax; if you base it per vehicle, then a plane is only about 5 times safer than a car for a given distance, and about 20 times more likely to crash than a car per trip.
- About 4% or so of all B747 or A300 ever built have been complete hull losses. (Newer planes are safer, presumably, but also haven't been around that long, so the statistics are not entirely trivial to compare.)
I find the whole "most accidents happen within X miles of home" argument so tired. That's like saying "most electrons are found within the vicinity of their nuclei."
I'd be more interested in knowing where FATAL accidents occur, on the suspicion that most people do not live on highways and local streets are traveled at lower speeds.
[1] I found 11 fatalities per trillion miles for planes, and 12.5 fatalities per billion miles for cars (in the US).