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Educatable_Fig t1_jb9vfn6 wrote

Interesting. Aging infrastructure? Staffing crisis? I find myself wondering how this compares to prior years. Certainly an unacceptable reality.

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AverageAustralian111 t1_jba1v78 wrote

It could be just that these things happen, the EU also has over 1,000 derailments a year. It seems to me like this is just the norm and because a particularly bad one happened over there recently, everyone is paying attention

Edit: as u/nac_nabuc has pointed out, this is counting fatalities, not injuries, I must've just misread the data.

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nac_nabuc t1_jbc0miy wrote

Are you sure you are comparing the same thing?

>Significant accident Any accident involving at least one rail vehicle in motion, resulting in at least one killed or seriously injured person, or in significant damage to stock, track, other installations or environment, or extensive disruptions to traffic. Accidents in workshops, warehouses and depots are excluded.

Says nothing about derailment. It's older data, but 2015 Europe has 0 deaths and 0 serious injuries from derailments and since your graph shows fatalities, my conclusion is that significant accident isnt limited to derailments.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?oldid=326173

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AverageAustralian111 t1_jbcbe71 wrote

Yes, you are absolutely correct. I'm not sure how I missed that.

My point was that, once preventative measures are at some level, as preventative measures reach diminishing returns, it is more efficient to deal with the very small number of accidents than it is to invest in trying to prevent them.

These recent Ohio and Greece accidents are the only ones I can recall that were bad enough to make the news. So at a rate of roughly 1 major accident in both the EU and US over...I would say around 5 years (although I might just not have heard about or not remember previous ones,) I would say the safety over this time has been pretty good. Definitely overwhelmingly better than road transport, which is its main competitor.

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nac_nabuc t1_jbccv85 wrote

If the derailments are due to infrastructure problems like signaling and track maintenance it probably doesn't make sense to try and achieve higher standards of safety for the US since their infrastructure costs are so ridiculously high. Wouldn't be surprised if you'd see budgets that are closer to Spanish HIGh speed construction costs for just some signaling and small track upgrades.

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nac_nabuc t1_jbcbscl wrote

I've found data for Spain (47m people but probably not a lot of rail usage).

8 derailments in 2021, p. 28 of this pdf: https://www.seguridadferroviaria.es/recursos_aesf/ias_nsa_espana_2022.pdf

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AverageAustralian111 t1_jbcd47h wrote

Damn, respect for finding that.

The big problem with comparing the US and EU countries is just how different they are. US passenger transport is totally backward compared to its EU counterpart, the almost the exact reverse is true with freight rail.

Freight rail is far more prone to accidents because A) the trains are far longer and the carriages are far heavier, and B) accidents are far less of a problem because the consequences of freight derailments are usually minimal (with non-hazardous freight at least, which is the majority of freight)

The second huge difference is population density. There are vast tracts of rail in the US that are far far away from any major population centers, which naturally makes maintenance far more difficult.

The flip side of this, of course, is the average derailment in Europe will cause more injuries and fatalities, so using fatalities as a proxy for derailments (as I accidentally did above) is unfair toward the EU.

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nac_nabuc t1_jbcdia3 wrote

Yeah, it's not the most relevant comparison but Reddit loves US Vs EU comparisons. :-D

The US also moves a lot more freight by rail if I'm not mistaken.

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AverageAustralian111 t1_jbce9m5 wrote

>Yeah, it's not the most relevant comparison but Reddit loves US Vs EU comparisons.

This is so frustrating to me. As someone who works in a field that overlaps all of the favourite comparisons (economics, crime, transport etc.) I find myself screaming internally about how much of an oversimplification pretty much every comparison of two countries is.

When the Americans pull out their economic statistics (usually GDP/c) and Europeans pull out their crime statistics, I have to stop myself from commenting and pointing out how little value any of these metrics really provide for anything.

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