Train Crash in India Kills 288

[hanselthecaretaker]

India's worst train crash in decades kills at least 288

Video footage showed derailed train coaches and damaged tracks. A witness involved in rescue operations said the screams and wails of the injured and the relatives of those killed were chilling.

www.reuters.com

Yikes.

Got me thinking, and nope there’s never been one with a bullet train.

About the Shinkansen

global.jr-central.co.jp

Meanwhile the US is also still failing on transportation infrastructure (among various others).

Why the US has no high speed rail - transcript of CNBC video - Barrington Institute

Why The US Has No High-Speed Rail, May 2019, 16 minutes. Full transcript below, made by the Train Campaign. [Start of video] China has the fastest and largest high-speed rail network in the world. The country has more than 19,000 miles of high-speed rail, the vast majority of which was built in...

barringtoninstitute.org

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[Ag3ma]

Why the US has no high speed rail - transcript of CNBC video - Barrington Institute

Why The US Has No High-Speed Rail, May 2019, 16 minutes. Full transcript below, made by the Train Campaign. [Start of video] China has the fastest and largest high-speed rail network in the world. The country has more than 19,000 miles of high-speed rail, the vast majority of which was built in...

barringtoninstitute.org

.

Railways generally require plentiful government subisidies, and the more advanced the train system, the higher the subsidies. The USA does not like its government spending money, so its train system is relatively unsophisticated. Also the USA is huge, to the point where planes start making a lot more sense for long-distance civilian travel.

There is an argument to just let uneconomic train services close. However, I suspect there has to be great caution with that, because trains are still moving a lot of people and stuff, andthe money saved by not subisidising rail may cause greater expense in road congestion, construction and maintenance.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Railways generally require plentiful government subisidies, and the more advanced the train system, the higher the subsidies. The USA does not like its government spending money, so its train system is relatively unsophisticated. Also the USA is huge, to the point where planes start making a lot more sense for long-distance civilian travel.

There is an argument to just let uneconomic train services close. However, I suspect there has to be great caution with that, because trains are still moving a lot of people and stuff, andthe money saved by not subisidising rail may cause greater expense in road congestion, construction and maintenance.

2023 Current State of the Union: US Federal Budget

How much is the national debt and how much does the federal government spend? Get nonpartisan data about the total US debt and the federal budget in 2023 with the State of the Union in Numbers.

usafacts.org

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The issue isn’t simply not liking it, so much as not liking what all that money is being spent on. The average tax payer should be seeing a lot higher return on investment.

 

[meiam]

Always worth pointing out with those big mass casualty events that the alternative might have been worse but spread out over multiple small event. If the train was replaced by a bunch of busses, how many people would have died in bus crashes over the years? There's no such things as perfect safety and potentially spending more on safety feature would have mean cutting down on the service, which again would have been replaced by other service that might have bigger death toll overall.

 

[Silvanus]

Always worth pointing out with those big mass casualty events that the alternative might have been worse but spread out over multiple small event. If the train was replaced by a bunch of busses, how many people would have died in bus crashes over the years? There's no such things as perfect safety and potentially spending more on safety feature would have mean cutting down on the service, which again would have been replaced by other service that might have bigger death toll overall.

Or they could have funded the safety features without cutting the service, which is perfectly possible.

 

[meiam]

Or they could have funded the safety features without cutting the service, which is perfectly possible.

But then those funds could have gone toward opening new service instead. It's never straightforward, always trade off and unknown. There's a lot of way that a system could theoretically be made safer, its not obvious before the fact which one really will save life and which one are redundant (and which one might actually make things less safe), when they're all taken together, it can be very expensive, especially when dealing with a large network with some section being much older than others.

 

[Silvanus]

But then those funds could have gone toward opening new service instead. It's never straightforward, always trade off and unknown.

Why are you casting it as an either/or between those two things? They're perfectly capable of fully funding both. One doesn't necessarily suffer if the other receives funding.

There's a lot of way that a system could theoretically be made safer, its not obvious before the fact which one really will save life and which one are redundant (and which one might actually make things less safe), when they're all taken together, it can be very expensive, especially when dealing with a large network with some section being much older than others.

Functioning, modern signal systems are an obvious requirement for safety. Globally, railway systems are antiquated and poorly maintained, and experts frequently point to the safety risks of ignoring the need for maintenance and upkeep. Corporatist politicians such as Narendra Modi aren't just in the dark about what to do. They get warned, then they ignore the warnings and continue to funnel money towards their cronies, then people die.

 

[Gergar12]

No train system will ever be profitable in the US given its low density. But it's worth it because I would rather people travel by train than by carpooling it with the possible car crash or moderate climate change emissions, or flying an environmentally inefficient way to travel. I also despise private jets, literally just fly first class.

In a sane world, it would be Trains > Ferries > Buses > Biking > Walking > Carpooling > Cars > Passenger Jets > Rocket Travel from Earth to Earth via high passenger capability > Private Fucking Jets

 

[Ag3ma]

No train system will ever be profitable

Per se, possibly not. But the cost / benefit of a service also has to be set against the wider impact of it being there or not. A train service canned for being unprofitable may cause costs elsewhere (increased alternative travel) that is net more expensive for the country in costs and inefficiencies elsewhere.

We've recently been through this in the UK. Due to cuts, social services and the health service both made cuts - but the cutbacks in one pushed costs onto the other because they have overlapping roles in public welfare. Loss of social services meant more people falling ill; less healthcare provision caused more people to rely on social services. Ultimately, siloed organisations where the bigger picture is not being examined are likely to result in suboptimal decision-making.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

...and experts frequently point to the safety risks of ignoring the need for maintenance and upkeep.

It's basic wisdom that you save a little now by skimping on maintenance and then pay a lot more later when things inevitably break. If I said I was going to save $50 on an oil change by waiting until my engine seized up, I'd be an idiot, right? Why do we encourage governments to go that route?

 

[Thaluikhain]

It's basic wisdom that you save a little now by skimping on maintenance and then pay a lot more later when things inevitably break. If I said I was going to save $50 on an oil change by waiting until my engine seized up, I'd be an idiot, right? Why do we encourage governments to go that route?

If you save a little now, and maybe someone else pays a lot more later, it can look like a bargain, from a certain point of view.

More charitably, you've got lots of competing demands on your resources, and you don't know you're disaster avoidance wasn't good enough until there's a disaster you didn't avoid. Though, that just means that people in the position to decide such things need to be smarter.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

It's basic wisdom that you save a little now by skimping on maintenance and then pay a lot more later when things inevitably break. If I said I was going to save $50 on an oil change by waiting until my engine seized up, I'd be an idiot, right? Why do we encourage governments to go that route?

Macro economics and politics: if you save $1 billion dollars a year by skimping out on maintenance now (or funnel that into companies you're going to get a job with), then odds are you won't be in power when everything goes to shit, and then you get to blame the other guys when everything breaks

 

[Ag3ma]

Macro economics and politics: if you save $1 billion dollars a year by skimping out on maintenance now (or funnel that into companies you're going to get a job with), then odds are you won't be in power when everything goes to shit, and then you get to blame the other guys when everything breaks

If the guiding motivation of a party is just to win power, it's very tempting to wreck the country just to make the other side look bad.

The suspicion of the Tories in the UK is that they'll do the usual trick of a tax cut giveaway just before the election. This to both boost their vote short-term, but also to force Labour to take a popularity hit by raising taxes or being unable to fix public services when they (as seems likely) win the election anyway.

Of course, it is the nature of the Tories that they campaign on how bad things are and how only they can fix it when they've been in power for 13 years and most of the problems can't realistically be laid at anyone else's feet, but thankfully they've got the right-leaning British press happy to smooth that over too.

 

[Baffle]

can fix it when they've been in power for 13 years and most of the problems can't realistically be laid at anyone else's feet

See, if Labour hadn't introduced the NHS it wouldn't be collapsing right now would it. We'd have bootstrapped ourselves to good health (well, the healthy ones of us anyway). Don't forget that the guy left a note saying there was no money left, even though there's never any money left.

 

[Thaluikhain]

See, if Labour hadn't introduced the NHS it wouldn't be collapsing right now would it. We'd have bootstrapped ourselves to good health (well, the healthy ones of us anyway). Don't forget that the guy left a note saying there was no money left, even though there's never any money left.

Nah, it was all Covid's fault, or the way the EU treated the UK after Brexit. And nothing to do with how covid or Brexit was handled (or even the fact that the later was even proposed).

 

[Ag3ma]

Nah, it was all Covid's fault, or the way the EU treated the UK after Brexit. And nothing to do with how covid or Brexit was handled (or even the fact that the later was even proposed).

I think, increasingly, Brexit is going to come under a great deal more scrutiny.

Labour is reluctant to whilst it needs to retake a lot of seats where Brexit was popular, because it reasonably fears a beating if it tries to go back and tell those people they made a mistake. But over time, I think the UK is essentially going to convert its hard Brexit into a soft Brexit even if much by stealth, and in the longer term probably rejoin the EU.

 

[Baffle]

Labour is reluctant to whilst it needs to retake a lot of seats where Brexit was popular, because it reasonably fears a beating if it tries to go back and tell those people they made a mistake.

It's fine, everyone I know who voted for it is pretending they didn't.