ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ijmorlan]

I was surprised the recent deaths in Edmonton and Calgary were not bigger news here as a warning to others.

It happens all the time.

It's what happens when you decide that you want to run trains at ground level in an urban environment (instead of burying them or putting them in the air, where they should be).

I’m not sure why you think trains should be grade-separated, but having roads at-grade is just peachy keen. As long as the total number of deaths per passenger mile is much lower than it is for road/bus transportation then there really isn’t much to be done — there is no reason why trains should be expected to be safer than anything else in our society, and at a certain point it’s way easier to reduce deaths by making something else safer rather than picking on trains.

I should also point out that one needs to look at the circumstances of whatever deaths occur to understand what is really going on. Consider two scenarios. In both there is a long narrow railway bridge crossing a river. Every so often somebody dies crossing it on foot. The first bridge has a purpose-built pedestrian bridge right next to it. The other does not, and in fact is the only way across the river for miles around, with a low-income residential area on one side and an important shopping and employment area on the other side.

In the first case, the people crossing it are just being stupid and dangerous. There is absolutely no reason for them to be on the bridge since they could use the pedestrian bridge that has been built for that purpose. These people, or their statistical equivalents, will kill themselves doing something dumb somewhere. So trying to squeeze every last bit of danger out of the rail infrastructure will not really help much.

In the second case, while the danger level is the same, the real problem is the lack of appropriate transportation links; and it’s very easy for a privileged person with a car to say “don’t walk on the rail tracks” but back in the real world people trying to hold down 3 jobs sometimes do what they have to do in order to keep their lives from falling apart entirely. In this case, it makes sense to reduce the danger by improving infrastructure; but note that the required improvement is not enhanced measures to keep people off the tracks but rather a parallel bridge to take the pedestrian traffic.