Tell that to the dozens of families who lost loved ones today! At least 68 people (and still counting) lost their lives. Ambitious, loving, caring human beings, who died completely unnecessarily! No excuse is good enough to justify that.
This type of accident is particularly unacceptable because it's so preventable! I'm not going to speculate on the causes before the official report is out. But a collision between two trains is not that hard to prevent with a train protection system. And if that system (or a component of it) crashes (or malfunctions in a fail-safe way), but operations should still continue, then there need to be safe fallback protocols in place that everyone is trained to follow.
One such rule might be, for instance, that following an electronic interlocking failure causing axle counter sections to be reset, meaning track vacancy cannot be proven, track sections must be swept by trains that may only run on sight at ~40km/h max.
"Someone made a mistake" is never an acceptable excuse. That's what we had to learn in aviation a long time ago. Nobody goes to work wanting to cause a fatal accident. The train dispatcher(s), driver(s), and whoever else might have been involved in this, (most likely) did not intend to cause this. But it is almost always a combination of bad procedures, normalization of deviance, lack of safety culture, bad training, lack of regulatory oversight, and of course inadequate technical equipment and safety systems, that together lead to fatal accidents.
Accidents like this one are fully preventable, there's no excuse, but that doesn't mean we should blame a particular person. Instead, it is the entire system, which is supposed to have multiple redundant layers of safety, that failed us. Investigators are going to come up with many recommendations to prevent similar accidents in the future. Let's hope (and make our voices heard) that these recommendations actually get implemented as well.
There was no excuse at all in my post, not sure what you're replying to.
It was only pointed out that despite failures in train systems, it's still safer than driving a car.
> One such rule might be, for instance, that following an electronic interlocking failure causing axle counter sections to be reset, meaning track vacancy cannot be proven, track sections must be swept by trains that may only run on sight at ~40km/h max.
All the rules you spoke of by the way were already in-place, but overruled. The protocol wasn't followed. The driver was supposed to go at 40, it's the protocol, but the rail operator instructed to continue at normal speed. When the train driver asked 'at normal speed?' the operator confirmed. The normal speed on that track is 200km/h by the way.
There is no doubt whatsoever that trains are far safer than cars. But often that fact is used as an excuse to not invest in safety. "We don't need to do anything to make thing X safer, because look at that other thing Y that people do which is way more dangerous."
(I assume you didn't mean it that way, but some people really do make this argument.)
Human lives matter in absolute numbers, and we should strive to increase safety wherever possible with reasonable effort. Railways in some countries still have some very low-hanging fruit!
The aviation industry has shown that safety as the number one priority does not have to be prohibitively expensive. Layers of redundancy, excellent training, and very good investigations and changes based on their recommendations are what keeps the flying public safe.
Accidents still happen in aviation, but we're at a point of diminishing returns where increasing safety is getting quite difficult. When an aircrew encounters a problem, they can't just stop the plane mid-air to figure things out. The plane has to land, no matter what. That is inherently more risky.
Contrast that with a train, which can more or less just stop wherever it is when something goes wrong. This allows for building a lot of fail-safe/passively safe systems. When there's a problem, just halt operations and take your time to figure things out. Good procedures and adherence to them are still absolutely necessary, but at least there's usually no actual time pressure (only perceived) and malfunctions rarely pose an actual risk if handled correctly.
What aviation has also shown us is that accident investigations need to be 100% honest about underlying causes. "This guy made a mistake, too bad" is never ever an acceptable reason. We have to dig deeper.
People will always make mistakes. But how was such a simple mistake allowed to have such dire consequences? Were there not enough layers of redundancy? Was the training inadequate? Were the rules and procedures inadequate, underspecified, or unclear? Was there a company culture of bending the rules to get the job done? Was there a general lack of safety culture and incident management? Etc.pp.
> All the rules you spoke of by the way were already in-place
I had guessed that was the case, but didn't want to state it definitively, as I'm not familiar with the rules in Spain specifically. But that then raises the question of why the rules weren't followed.
> the rail operator instructed to continue at normal speed. When the train driver asked 'at normal speed?' the operator confirmed
As I explained earlier, "there's been a misunderstanding" is not good enough, I'm sure the report will dig deep to find the underlying causes and will issue plenty of recommendations to prevent this in the future.
I will refrain from speculating on what those causes are though, as there are far too many possibilities. But it's almost certainly a combination of multiple unfortunate factors that led to this horrible accident.
Every protocol has corner cases, we have seen it world wide several times. It's frustrating to accept it because yesterday's accident was just a one word mistake from an operator, and my first reaction is also yours, it's unacceptable. But sadly and rationally, it can happen. As always has been, let's hope this leads to better protocols.
Then lets crash 10x more trains, it will still be safer than cars. The point is not to be safer than cars, the point is to not die while taking my daily commute in a form of transportation I have no control over whatsoever. Especially if its easy to mitigate like in the case of trains.
> the point is to not die while taking my daily commute
Exactly, which is why you need to take trains, not cars.
Everything else you said completely misconstrues the point, nobody is arguing for less train or car safety, or that this crash was fine. That's ridiculous.
Guys, let's not turn everything into a trains vs cars debate. Obviously, trains are much safer.
But the argument that the relative risk of trains is far lower is, unfortunately, often used as an excuse to not take safety in absolute terms seriously. It's almost like saying: "Because trains are already so much safer than cars, the few crashes that still happen are just bound to happen, they're a fact of life we have to accept, and not worth doing anything about." (I am exaggerating, of course.)
But many of these accidents are in fact easy to prevent, even without huge investment in new infrastructure. So we should prioritize that and make our voices heard that we care about railway safety! And no, this is not a psyop to make people drive their cars more, that would be ridiculous.
But the activists are not the point. Animal rights activists are a minority, things change because the majority or a significant share of people backs them.
In this case this large group that backs banning horse drawn carriages is very likely eating industrially produced meat. That’s the inconsistency, 95% of Americans eat meat and a substantial share cause far greater inhumanity on animals through their diets which are completely optional (as in, they could vote with their mouth and stop it), than these horse drawn carriages which they want to ban.
I think if a bunch of horses were dropping dead in my city from heat exhaustion, and the only upside to having them was that they congested the roads and left shit everywhere, then I would weigh the two and probably say better to not have them. Turns out 78% of registered New Yorkers agree. Maybe they are all massive hypocrites and should actually support this, since they also eat meat.
Essentially this is simply what solar panels have done for ages, feed back electricity to the grid, sure it's not through a power outlet but essentially it connects to the grid in a similar way.
What's new is cheap and ubiquitous micro-inverters. Before it wasn't worth putting a $800 inverter on a small 2-panel 600 or 800 installation. Now with micro inverters being so cheap, this tech becomes viable. And with loads so limited (less than a microwave) the regulation is equally light to allow this convenient plug-in solution.
I mean a Toyota Yaris (first facelift) from 2016 for example sits around a ton (1070), and it's completely comfortable to drive on the highway.
And it's not some niche car, it's one of the most sold compact cars on the planet. And the 2026 versions are actually slightly lighter at 1025 and are very comfortable.
Of course comfort is up to interpretation, and as cars get better, our window of expectation moves, the cars my dad used to drive for 8 hours in a row for our summer vacations in the 1970s are considered ridiculously loud and cramped by today's standards. Just like Kings of the past had no tropical fruit in winter, while even unknown shitty corps hand them out for free to their unpaid interns at this point, our standards move.
But even with today's standards I think a modern Yaris at 1 ton (+2%) is completely fine for highway driving.
No not per se, but most people tend to stop using the switches.
The Hue basically just adds a switch inside the bulb, which can be remote controlled. The lamp's switch is still there, and functions as normal (turning on or off electricity to the bulb).
So your light is on when the lamp's switch + the hue's switch is on. It's off when either one is off.
So if your light is on, you can indeed walk to a lamp and turn the switch off to turn off the light. Or you can turn off the Hue bulb via your phone (or Philips Hue switches you can put anywhere in the house, they're basically bluetooth switches that run on a <$1 replaceable battery that lasts 2 years.
If you turn off your Hue light via your app, you can turn it back on later via the app, but not the light switch (as that's already on, but the bulb isn't).
And if you turn off your lamp via its switch, you can turn it back on later via the same switch, but not the app, as the bulb is already on but not getting power as the lamp's switch is off.
Especially with multiple people living in the house with different behaviors, that becomes annoying. So usually people choose to stop using the lamp switch and only use the Hue. You can of course hook-up the bulb to a Hue switch, so you can turn it on and off with both the switch and the app.
I'd want to add a bit of nuance to that, as bright lights hurt my eyes and induce headaches (sometimes migraines).
For that reason I really like overhead lights as:
1. You can easily fit a larger number of overhead lights (e.g. 6 overhead lights vs 2 eye-level task lights)
2. For equivalent lighting in a room say x lumens, each overhead light must be x/6, whereas the 2 eye-level lights would be x/3 lumens, much brighter.
3. Because the lights are overhead, they're not in my vision, yet light up the objects in my room.
I still have 5 eye-level lamps in my living room, but they supplement the overhead lights which always give a base amount of light, and allow the lamps to be less bright. Every time I turn off the overhead lights I see too little, and if I turn up my lamps to see better, it is too bright for the comfort of my eyes.
It's akin to driving: I like having a sun above me, when it's low in the sky before dusk and shining in my eyes, it sucks, even though objects are less bright and visible than midday, simply because of the positioning of the light vis-a-vis my eyes.
A regular household plug should be more than enough unless you want to use your home as a quick pit-stop between two long rides. (e.g. drive 150km from work to home, then drive 300km to your holiday home for the weekend an hour later).
Typical EVs nowadays get about 6 km per kWh, the average driver in the US drives about 54 km. A US home typically has 15A plugs, or 20A in the kitchen/garage. That's 1.8 - 2.4 kW. Even at 80% safe continuous charge, you'll be averaging 1.5 kW at minimum. So that's just 6 hours of daily charging at minimum.
If you have a garage and plug in when you get home, your car typically sits there from 8PM to 8AM for 12 hours. That's already double the time necessary to charge 100% of your driving at home, at the minimum charging speeds equivalent to a microwave or washing machine. And you'll typically have much more time with the car plugged in on weekends and home-work days.
A 5k upgrade to the electrical box might be a good idea, but it's definitely not necessary for most normal EV users.
As for ROI, a Corolla might get 20 km per liter, in Connecticut that's 6c per km. An EV even at the 29c per kWh is just 4.8c per km which is 20% cheaper. If you have some solar panels you can cut that figure by another 65%.
Not to mention the lower maintenance costs for EVs and the rebates various local governments give.
> The reality is, however, that consumers don't want EVs for a myriad of reasons and prefer hybrids.
I think this is completely true for the period 2010 - 2030.
But from 2030 onwards, it seems 4 things are structurally different in many markets:
1. energy per kilometer, improved about 30% (from about 5 km per kWh to about 6.5)
2. kwh of useable battery, increased by about 80%
3. chargers per person, increased by about 20x
4. Charge speed increased by 5x from about 50 kW to 250 kW
All these figures are approximate averages for normal EVs, the very low / very high end are different.
So we have more battery, which we use less of to drive, which we can charge faster, and at way more places.
The reality is that an average European for example drives about 30km per day. Take the base model Tesla 3, it has 575 km of range and can charge 285 km in 15 minutes. The base model. So for the average driver that's a ~15 minute charge, every 10 days. For the average person an EV makes more and more sense.
That's today, for a base model car, which is suffering from cheap and quality competition out of China that will be even better.
Cars that will be released in 3 years from now (>2030) are even more favorable. I honestly think the 'myriad of reasons to prefer a hybrid' is soon going to be an exception, not the rule, for newly purchased cars (of course the 2nd hand market is a different, delayed story). And compromising your car design won't let you compete with manufacturers that don't compromise and go fully EV.
If you consider the squeeze that regulators worldwide are going to be putting on gas the next decades, I think going full-EV on new models makes sense. Sure you can keep selling some ICE cars but developing entirely new ICE models, and mixing an EV into them?
Yeah very creepy, I'm afraid it'll be normalised in a few years, together with the cameras in our glasses.
I always knew this was coming eventually, with storage and compute getting so cheap, eventually every record can and then will be saved for security / convenience reasons. Every word uttered, every emotion shown on your face, every URL visited, every view you laid your eyes on.
I will miss the days that things could happen and be forgotten.
No doubt this stuff is all very useful, but I'd rather we skip this line of technology.
‘… but contrary to what a regular person may think (that this level of data gathering is unusual), privacy experts know that it’s not, it is standard practice’
The bodycount sits around 100 this year for trains and 1775 last year for cars.
Even correcting for distance travelled it’s still way more safe.
reply