>>1915914Life lost in an airline crash is more politically impactful because it's generally more of a large-scale systemic thing than a collection of individual incidents.
When a plane goes down it's very easy to determine and assign blame to a systemic problem: bad maintenance standards, design flaws, poorly trained crew, et cetera. It seems like a failure of an institution as opposed to an individual, and when an institution a lot of people put their lives in care of (such as the airline industry) has a major failing, there is impetus for the people subject to that institution to demand change. If 200 people die in a plane crash because of some sensor failure, people and government are going to push for stricter maintenance and inspection standards on that part.
Cat crashes on the other hand are, the vast majority of the time, the fault of one individual. Drunk or distracted drivers, or people who don't know how to drive in poor weather conditions. There's no "system" that failed - just people being self-centered or negligent. There's no obvious enforceable solution like "ban distracted driving" because individuals can't be nearly as strictly and thoroughly policed as something like an airline. There's a couple dozen major airlines, there's hundreds of millions of individuals.
When there *are* more systemic failures in road transport, they do get acted on - there's a lot of mandated safety features in modern cars, and infrastructure and traffic laws are created with safety in mind. But at the end of the day, the government can't always be everywhere to stop every drunk idiot from getting in his car. It would be nice if we could just regulate bad driving out of existence but it's like trying to ban porn or alcohol - there's way too many people doing it and not nearly omnipresent enough a government to stop them.
Basically - air carriers and plane manufacturers are low-hanging fruit for government oversight
