Flutterby™! : Death by Text 2008-10-02 02:49:16.560537+00

Death by Text

2008-10-02 02:49:16.560537+00 by ebradway 5 comments

I've always feared getting run over by a txt'ing teen - but I'd never dreamed that the train engineer would be the text-murderer...

#Comment Re: made: 2008-10-02 12:34:03.88099+00 by: meuon [edit history]

The issue is, he was distracted. Banning cell phones, blow jobs, MP3 players... etc.. specifically is stupid. Someone will always come up with another means to be distracted. Find his direct supervisor and make him an example, because he either knew what he was up to on a daily basis and ignored it, or he was clueless. Either way, he is an accomplice.

Huh? The guy was a train engineer. His supervisor wasn't on the train to monitor his actions. Nor could the supervisor search him and remove his cell phone before each shift - or search his cell phone records to see if he'd been texting on the job.

Texting is illegal in cars, just extend that to operators of all vehicles. The guy who's guilty already paid the ultimate price, he received the death penalty. I'd say prosecuting someone who had no real control over him wouldn't make much of a difference in prevention of this happening again.

On the Chicago elevated trains they used a block system. If a train entered a block (a specific length of track), a metal arm in the middle of the tracks would raise, some distance behind the train. If another train entered the same block the arm would hit a switch on the bottom of the second train and trigger the brakes. This could only be overridden by very deliberate action at very slow speeds. It wasn't perfect, but it had worked for a number of years. Why was something like this not in place to stop both trains in both directions?

I don't understand why train signals, of all systems, aren't computer controlled. Sure, we can give the engineers overrides, but they already have some pretty hefty communications networks in place, the signals are all there, and the signaling system is pretty low bandwidth and simple. All that's needed is some mechanism other than a human hanging their head out the window to read 'em.

Sure, if you give the engineers that much less to do than they've already got you risk even less attention, but one or two more cars hit at crossings per year weighed off against an order of magnitude or three reduction in the chance of a train to train collision seems worth it.

The fault lies with the partial attention of the deceased, sure, but it's shared with the managers and architects of a system that puts a person in a situation where they're mostly superfluous to the process, and then expects them to be entirely attentive.