David Telesha wrote:metrarider wrote:
You are entitled to your opinion, but calling a mistake in judgement 'murder' is beyond a fair comparison IMHO. Gross Negligence and failure to use due care, yes, Murder, no
Breaking the LAW is a "mistake in judgement"?????
If I go rob a bank is that a mistake in judgement??
Gross negligence and manslaughter - thats what it is.
Don't run a lowered gate with flashing RED lights and you'll live. Any simpler and it would be even more (if thats possible) horribly ridiculous.
I did say it was gross negligence, and I would agree with the manslaughter as well.
Robbing a bank is a premeditated action, and as such is substantially different than a split second decision to go around a gate. At some level though they are all errors in judgement, but that statement is not meant to defend the actions of those that undertook those acts.
David Telesha wrote:
metrarider wrote:
many factors go into a drivers decision to go around gates. In fact in some circumstances gates go down and no train comes, and they go back up again, or gates go down and you wait 20 minutes or longer for the train to clear
Saying that the 1 out of 1,000,000+ crossing malfunctions that cause the gates to go down w/ lights and back up without a train passing as the cause for running a gate makes no sense AT ALL.
I'm not talking about malfunctions.
Gates routinely go down and then go back up again, as many have motion detection which will raise the gates again if a train stops. I see this happen multple times daily on the crossings near my house. The train approaches the crossing, gates go down, train stops before the crossing, gates go up.
David Telesha wrote:
metrarider wrote:
6) Reduce the length of time crossings are blocked.
Saying the 25 +/- seconds that the gates are down before the train passes makes people impatient is just as ignorant. Or are you saying the speed over crossings should be increased meaning that the chance of survival for a crossing runner is decreased but thats okay as long as other people don't have to wait more that a few minutes?
No, I'm talking about 20+ minutes for a slow moving freight to go by, and yes it is impatience and ignorace, but we cannot completly cure either fault in humans as it's simply a trait many posess.
And no, I don't suggest decreasing the time before the gates go down, I'm not even advocating any partilar approach, but trying to bring some rational discussion about how safety might be improved by recognising some human factors and applying (hopefully) simply mitigation factors
understand, none of my comments are meant to absolve the driver of responsibility or to shift blame to the railroads or anyone else, simply trying to bring up the issue of human factors for which there are mitigation techniques that if reasearched and applied could greatly reduce these types of incidents.
Mitigating human factors in part is what lead to ATS systems and cab signals on many passenger lines, it's underlying many procedures for maintence and operation of trains and occurs in road traffic planning in many cases, it should simply also be looked at in grade crossings.
I think we'd all agree that grade crossing accidents are tragic, from the perspective of the engineer who has to live with the deaths and the surviving members of the families of the deceased. Following from that it would be A Good Thing (tm) if we can reduce these types of accidents.