I mean east Palestine incident was just a little under 2 years ago. Rail safety was a solved problem that eventually became a problem because it got in the way of shareholders. I think John Oliver has a segment on it.
Well, the train infrastructure could take the blame. Level crossings for high speed rail are more dangerous than ones where cars and pedestrians can't encroach on the rail at all.
amtrak required my town to build medians at all crossings, so idiots can’t go around the gates
whoever owns those tracks probably didn’t want to spend more on infrastructure that doesn’t cause needless delays.p, making people impatient. They should be partly liable
Florida man, at it again. The firefighter driving that truck should face serious consequences. Railroads are generally pretty safe, it's the motor vehicle death cult that causes way more deaths and injuries: see this example here.
I get it. Freight train passes, warning arms don't go up. Must be broken.
But I'm pretty sure I'd sit there annoyed for at least five minutes before I even imagine trying to go though the closed arms. And in a long vehicle like a fire truck?!?
Yea I'm still trying to figure out how a fire truck can physically get around rail road arms. Like at that point why not just drive through them. They break pretty easily and would have been less expensive than destroying a whole fire truck.
I would be very interested to know which countries have 100% grade-separated crossings, especially if they're mostly flat, so they can't take advantage of terrain (and also aren't micronations).
For high speed rail, most countries with any real HSR infrastructure will have grade separation unless absolutely impossible for some reason. France, Japan, Spain.
On those tracks, people are used to very slow cargo trains. That also means that if you have to wait, it can be a very long time. Idiots may be tempted to go around because of the long wait, and there’s usually lots of time. Their whole lives, they e gotten away with this
Then a medium speed train comes through. They wouldn’t have had to wait. There’s no time to go through and still avoid. But the idiots don’t know that, despite the regular news for the last several years
Three firefighters and a dozen passengers were injured in Florida on Saturday after a firetruck drove around rail crossing arms and into the path of a high-speed passenger train after having waited for a previous train to pass, according to a person briefed on what happened.
Watch DeSantis and other Republicans to use this to demonize trains and not REALLY FUCKING STUPID DRIVERS.
Clearly high speed trains are the problem here. How can one safety weave through the crossing guards anymore with trains at such a reckless haste? Plus it looks like this time the train used another train as cover to trick everyone. Sneaky. And don't say the arms were still down and that was enough...you can't trust them, do your own research.
Seriously, the one thing I haven't found from any sources is if the truck was trying to respond to a call or not. Not that it really matters, still a dangerous move, but it would explain the lack of caution.
Hopefully it's a metaphor for our politics. "Entitled person in power thinks rules don't apply to him, bypasses guardrails, finds out (rather roughly) that physics applies to everyone."
It's Florida. The state that hires cops who have actually been fired for being bad cops. The state that is run by people so cartoonishly stupid that it feels unreal but it isn't.