Safety - but sensible safety (Train safety)

Member Name: Alternum

Product:	Train safety
Date:	24/10/00 (22 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast, statistically very safe (esp. compared to cars), comfortable

Disadvantages: If there's a crash, people get upset because they've had no hand in it - handing over control of their destiny to the train driver...

It was painfully evident after the more recent train crash at Hatfield, the third major one in recent ones, how the tabloids were baying for the blood of various train company executives - be they from Railtrack, GNER, or any other company which remotely had anything to do with it. The argument apparently goes that trains, as a public service, should be utterly, completely safe, and people should be able to travel on them without any risk to them whatsoever.

The thing is that this is actually true. Statistically speaking the number of people that have died on train journeys compared to the number of people that have taken train journeys is very, very, almost negligently small. Now I realise that this is a very callous way of looking at things, to simply dismiss deaths as a random error, and I don't like it myself - so I'll present another argument, and come back to this later.

Trains, to state the obvious, are machines. They run with moving parts - and as any engineer will tell you, things that have moving parts will go wrong eventually, it's a fact of life. No machine is totally perfect. Admittedly there are things that could be done to make them better, but you're never going to attain a state of affairs where a machine never, ever breaks down. For instance, early warning systems to stop trains if they go through red lights is an improvement which could/is being made. But there's no way you can do anything about a rail that happens to break, short of massively increased inspections, which causes delays to passengers.

The point is that whenever you use any form of transport there is a trade-off between convenience and risk. Cars are more convenient than trains, and so the risk is higher. In trains you are supposed to have a dedicated driver, and so on, and so the risk is less. But there is still risk there, and you implicitly agree to take on this risk when you get on the train. You know there is a small chance somethi
ng could go wrong.

I agree that improvements could be made. Improvements can always be made. But if the trains were made much safer, there'd be fewer of them, because half the track and trains would always be stopped somewhere awaiting safety inspections. It's the same argument as saying that reducing the road speed limit down to 20 or 15 would save lives. True, but no-one would ever get anywhere. Where do we stop?

Let's not go overboard on safety - there can be such a thing as too much. Sense is what's required here, and I just hope the government and rail managers don't bow to the tabloid frenzy that is fuelling all this hype.

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