The death toll from aviation is high, just not the death toll when you only look at major passenger lines. Add in GA, and the numbers stop looking so sweet.
I would imagine buses compare favourably to small cars also. GA pilots have less monitoring, and are more likely to be involved in many of the same activities that cause car crashes, but in the air. And more likely to be manually flying also.
The argument was never "planes are inherently safer than cars" but rather "commercial passenger flights are safer than cars because of all the precautions (human and technical) we take"
I suspected that you were right, and doing a bit of research, you definitely are. The rate of fatalities in busses is quite low compared to cars and light trucks.
