nac_nabuc t1_jbc0miy wrote on March 7, 2023 at 11:16 PM

Reply to comment by AverageAustralian111 in [OC] Let’s look at some train data 🚂, data from US Federal Railroad Administration by nymaps

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

AverageAustralian111 t1_jbcbe71 wrote on March 8, 2023 at 12:34 AM

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.

nac_nabuc t1_jbccv85 wrote on March 8, 2023 at 12:45 AM

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.