When we ride the train, we all want to feel safe — that's a given. Two accidents in the past month involving Amtrak trains have resulted in passenger injury, perhaps calling that feeling into question.

Neither appears to have been caused by anything the onboard crew did or didn't do, and neither appears to have been technologically preventable using the standard definition of Positive Train Control now in varying stages of nationwide implementation. (Investigators may eventually disagree.)

Is it logical for this to make us feel less safe? Before I talk about safety goals, let's take a look at some numbers.

The latest year for which I can find statistics is 2014. In that year, Amtrak had less than 2 accidents per million passenger-miles. (A passenger-mile is one passenger carried for one mile.) The trend is downward from 2000, when the number was closer to 4.

The all-time high was slightly over 4.5 in 1978. In 2012, when accidents were down 10 percent under 2014, total passenger fatalities were 5 and injuries were 1,451 for just under 100 million passenger-miles traveled.

It's hard to convert train miles to passenger-miles given the statistics available, but a quick extrapolation looks like there is a slight upward trend in injuries and fatalities per million passenger-miles when we also consider accidents of the past 18 months. Either way, rail travelers go a whole bunch of miles with little risk. Is it still logical to feel less safe?

Commercial air travel is still the statistically safest mode, with an average over the past decade (available statistics) of only .07 fatalities per billion passenger-miles. Feel any safer?

This article isn't meant to turn anyone off travel by train. It's just that each mode of transportation has its own risks and rewards, and there are some risks inherent to rail that do not show up in air transport.

Take, for instance, grade crossing accidents — both pedestrian and vehicle. The only place a similar accident could occur with air transport is on a runway or taxiway, where only a small percentage of the trip occurs.

Statistically, if you take 10 50-mile hops per month by air rather than one 500-mile trip per month, your risk of injury goes significantly up — more takeoffs and landings. Similarly, if you ride a commuter train to work in a city with grade crossings, chances are higher you will be on a train that hits a car or pedestrian in any one month than if you take the Southwest Chief from Kansas City to Albuquerque every day of that same month.

By the way, cars and light trucks on urban and rural highways still take the prize for risk. If you were comparing casino games, trains would be nickel slots and highways would be high-stakes poker.

What then? Should we concede that rail is safe as it gets and not try be safer? That would be like saying you won't ever replace your car tires because you never had a blowout.

An ideal goal is that all railroads — including passenger rail operators running on somebody else's tracks — develop a proactive safety culture as a part of their overall business culture. All members of the organization must not just follow safety rules, but also must have a situational awareness for unsafe practices that fall outside of the rules coupled with safety departments that seek to correct reported conditions rather than mete out punishments.

In the course of a long career, I spent well over a decade as a safety professional. You can take it from me when I say that the goal of 100 percent safe operation is like achieving the speed of light: The closer you get, the harder it becomes to get there (and the more money it takes).

It doesn't take much imagination to realize human frailties can get around almost any safety protocol, and any automated safety device. We have an unfortunate human capacity to circumvent even the most sophisticated safety protocol or electronic device without giving it much thought.

We may not know how we did it, and we probably couldn't do it again, but once is enough to keep us from reaching that 100 percent safety goal. The more automation controls the physical aspects of railroading, the more egregious human-caused accidents will seem.

Should we feel less safe? I think you know the answer.

I've see nothing to indicate that anyone in the passenger rail industry thinks it is a good idea to be lax on safety or focus on the bottom line at the expense of safety. All the indicators are pointing in the right direction.

In the future, passenger rail travel will be more safe — and it's already very, very safe. In that same future, society will be less tolerant of accidents, and that's also a good thing.

We won't get to the speed of light, but we will get close. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try.