Are Trains Too Safe?
2 Sep 2003
[752w]
A train driver who tries to make up for lost time sounds like a train driver doing a good job. I wasn’t on the 6.55 from King’s Lynn yesterday morning, so I don’t know - perhaps he really was driving like a crazy person, but on the face of it he sounds like a man with the right priorities. Whereas in fact the unexamined response is that this was “an incident”.
It's the same in the air. Airlines say "your safety is our first priority". Please, no. Their first priority should be carrying people from one place to another on time and without charging them too much. I'm happy to rely on the pilot or driver's fear of death. So long as the person in charge shares the risks that's good enough. And if he thinks the risks involved in making up lost time are risks worth taking, then let's go. Hold your breath.
Perhaps this seems flippant. It is not. Public transport is if anything too safe. Refer to section 12.22 of the current Social Trends (hold your breath – here come statistics). The average rail death rate 1999-2001 was one for every four billion passenger-kilometres. Imagine you commuted thirty miles each way every day for forty years. In all that time your chances of dying in a train crash were one fortieth of one percent (air travel, in case you wondered, is so safe the death rate often appears as 0.0).
Not a big risk then. By living so far from your job you saved money which you spent on a smoke alarm. This probably reduced your risk of death by a comparable amount. And look at the alternatives. You're going to drive? Bad news. The risk of death is more than ten times what it was when you went by train. (And there’s an even greater, moral, risk that you kill somebody else when you drive. Over eight hundred people get run over and killed every year. A hundred are children.)
How often have you thought "oh bother this train, I wish I'd driven"? When the train was late, did you ever blow a tenner on a taxi? So getting there on time was worth increasing your chance of death ten times. I'm sure you're a safer driver, but two cars are involved in every collision and only one need be in the hands of a fool. Yet people drive. The risks are worth it. Public transport on the other hand is so safe there might be worthwhile gains to be had by making it riskier too. If it got a little less safe but a lot faster and more reliable, might that be a fair deal? Remember, this is the deal you make when you drive.
Why will this never happen? Partly because the risks on a train are not risks we control. I don’t mind the risk that I crash myself so much as I mind the risk somebody else crashes me. I understand the first risk better. This is a respectable consideration. But driving does offer many riceboy-related risks that are still out of your hands and it’s a moral certainty these add up to more involuntary risk than you get on the 6.55.
In any event the main reason public transport can’t take risks to get us there on time is sentimentality. We find rail accidents more shocking because lots of people die together in one place at one time, so it makes a story in the papers. We are too sentimental to be moved to the same extent by a much larger number of anonymous people dying in different places in the course of every day. Ten every day.
If you got the same column-inches per death for car crashes that you get for train accidents, they would fill the front five pages of every newspaper every day. But they don’t make good stories. And we are too sentimental to be shocked by death unless someone puts it in a story. Hence we think trains are more dangerous than they are. That's why the poor chap driving the WAGN train is the subject of an inquiry and everyone thinks “quite right too”.
Me, I’d like to buy him a drink. A train driver who decides it’s worth the risk to floor it when we’re running late is a train driver who gets my vote. Hold your breath.
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