Why is it a weird metric? People travel exactly as far as they need to, not based on time.

Because when trying to compare different things (car, train, plane, space ship, etc), they all travel at different speeds, by different methods, with different categories.

An example? Travel to the moon would be the safest thing ever, even if 50% of the ships exploded, because of how far it is. I bet travel to Mars would the safest thing ever, based upon miles, even if 99% of the ships exploded.

Things break based upon two things. One is maintenance per trip. And each trip has riskier parts, of which start and end are parts. Planes have issues taking off and landing, a lot more than cruising. Same for space ships. Even cars have issues at start and end of trip, if you're driving very long distances.

What, no? Earth to the moon is 200,000 miles away. Call it a half million for a round trip.

Airliner passenger deaths are 1 per several billion miles.

Yes, but your response does not invalidate the premise.

You didn’t give a coherent premise, just this wild tangent.

An old article from 1998 says the risk of death per hour of travel for air vs car is about the same.

https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debat...

But, I disagree with the article, I think the debate is hardly settled.