The more safety components are added the more complacency becomes a problem.
Hurry up and wait at the signal!
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Nasadowsk wrote:Get off your high horse. The Buffalo commuter plane crass killed 10 times as many people and lead to no substantial changes. The public will forget about this whole thing in about three weeks. The only people who are are safety scolds and signal vendors who stand to cash in. 4 fatalities in 30 years is a more than acceptable causality level. Fung Wah bus kills more people in a week.Tadman wrote: Reminds me of the PTC mandate. Crash caused by texting? Mandate a billion dollar technology that doesn't exist! God forbid we address the root cause and ban texting/cell usage and enforce the rules like we enforce rules about operating under the influence.The root cause is you have an unreliable single point of failure, and no redundant backup. PTC is going to be that redundant backup. The railroads had decades to implement their own redundant backup. They didn't. Then a crash happened in the wrong congressional district. Now this has happened. The industry can't police itself and feels it's cheaper to pay out lawsuits. That answer is no longer acceptable to congress, or the general public. They don't care that this'll shave a few cents off the dividend for the next few years. They don't care that it'll cost the local transit agency a hundred million or two (hell - MN just blew 370 million on the Port Jervis line, whose ridership is close to being a rounding error for the system as a whole).
For that matter - in water cooler conversation all this week, the one thing that kept coming up is "why isn't there a system in place to prevent this???" Try explaining that in a way that doesn't outrage the average commuter.
Metro-North has a new nickname among a few folks I know, now. It's not pretty, either.
ryanov wrote:Exactly. The root cause of the Spuyten Duvyil accident isn't the engineer, it's a lack of PTC/ Cab signal drops/ other safety system. Although it's irrelevant with the clarified wording, SLE is a Metro-North train west of New Haven, Amtrak east of NHV, they change crews at NHV. Amtrak NEC trains are Amtrak all the way through (semi-overhead trackage rights on MN). Poor Amtrak. They have the first two successful passenger PTC implementations (ACSES and ITCS), and now they get dragged into this because of negligence on MN's part.Tadman wrote:I don't like this, it's government grandstanding. Meanwhile, we're going to have another tragic accident in a few years because we didn't address the root cause. Reminds me of the PTC mandate. Crash caused by texting? Mandate a billion dollar technology that doesn't exist! God forbid we address the root cause and ban texting/cell usage and enforce the rules like we enforce rules about operating under the influence.The root cause for MetroLink was "trains are not prevented from crashing into one another." Cell phones are not the root cause, they are just one means of distraction. As proven by this incident, there are many different ways to be distracted, and PTC would have prevented all of them if it works as demanded. In fact, they even address the root cause here by saying "fix your signaling system to prevent this, and use a second set of eyes in the meantime at these locations." So government grandstanding? You haven't provided any evidence of that whatsoever. Maybe it's overkill for the amount of risk, but there's no question that it will save lives if properly implemented.
Jersey_Mike wrote:Nasadowsk wrote:Tadman wrote: 4 fatalities in 30 years is a more than acceptable causality level. Fung Wah bus kills more people in a week.
RearOfSignal wrote:The more safety components are added the more complacency becomes a problem.So true. I've tried to make this case to safety officers over the years but it seems like for them, it's all about justifying their jobs and having something to point to and exclaim: look how many lives I saved!