Rail vs. road safety
By adamg - Tue, 06/17/2008 - 4:02pm.
This morning's gravel-truck smasharoonie on I-93 gets Sean Roche to thinking:
When the trolleys crashed on the D-Line, there was much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands about the MBTA's track record (pun intended). The Herald had a whole timeline of T incidents.
But, a truck crashes on the highway and there is rarely a recap of all the incidents on the highway and the accumulated lost time to travelers stuck, like those this morning, for hours. The media doesn't treat accidents on the highway as part of a connected story of problems because there is no connection among the motor vehicle operators involved in the crashes ...
Difference between accidents
being that nobody died in the Expressway accident, and it didn't happen in a residential area with lots of witnesses?
A matter of expectations.
People expect there to be accidents on roads because they see how poorly people drive every day.
People don't expect there to be rail accidents because they are relatively rare with respect to car accidents.
When people immediately
When people immediately started calling for improved safety on the green line, it pissed me off.
Green line uses visual signals, just like traffic lights, so there were called for an automatic system....but for cars thats ok?
Green line drivers have extra training, but the millions of car drivers are fine with a quick test?
And so on. Its stupid.
And you have to steer a truck
You have to steer a truck, you know, keep in lane, dodge other cars, etc. It's a bit more surprising to crash a trolley where it's a stop/go proposition.
Yes, there are those tracks.
Yes, there are those tracks. Expectations are, you won't have an accident if you're driving on tracks. Whereas, many more trucks are on the road each day, dealing with knucklehead car drivers changing lanes in front of them without warning. Trust me - truck drivers fear you much more than you fear them.
Fear
They're the ones who'll have to live with it, after all.