KevinSun242 wrote:And in response to the person calling it vandalism and why the T doesn't call the passengers out on it, they did do this a while back. Joe Pesaturo went out and said during another smoke incident that the passengers should not have kicked out the windows and that they never were any danger. That ended up being a PR disaster.
They need to! What's absurd is statements like "If I see smoke I'm smashing a window." If you do that you should be banned from the system as you're a detriment to public safety. Fire alarms in large buildings are designed now to orchestrate a civil and organized evacuation because we've seen countless times how chaos results in tremendous unnecessary casualty. If it were a good idea for widows to be used as emergency exits, the windows would be emergency exits. Again, it's not a design flaw that they aren't! The public needs to be better trained in what to do in an emergency (ie. if a door slides open while the train is at speed, push the call box to notify the motorman, recording it with your cell phone does nothing to negate the hazard). Whether that's accomplished by more signage, videos in stations like Amtrak's clips that loop at South Station, televised PSAs, all of the above, or whatever, it needs to be done.
Quite often, a train will come up on a small fire in the tracks likely ignited by the preceding train's passage (from which the tunnel can accumulate a lot of smoke) and the motorman will hop out of the cab with an extinguisher, put it out, and continue the trip. What happens if you start bashing a window so people can jump out and when you do that the train starts moving? Now you've gotten people killed completely without purpose.
This automatic reaction to smashing things is going to result in death. The T needs to stop worrying about PR when safety is concerned and act as though safety really is a concern.