Where Worlds Collide

Yesterday, seven people died when a minibus carrying fourteen holidaymakers to Manchester Airport crashed on the M56, half-way through it’s three-mile journey. As many people died at the train crash at Southall, and three less than the crash at Hatfield that all but brought Britain’s railways to a complete standstill.

Those rail crashes were all over the news for weeks. Yesterday’s M56 accident wasn’t even the lead item on Channel 4 news. All of which highlights the totally different attitudes towards accidents between the two modes of transport.

On Transport Blog, Brian Micklethwaite writes this rather silly post.

The big difference between road safety and train safety is that road safety is in your hands. If you drive carefully you can pretty much guarantee not to get killed in your car, or to kill anyone else.

That may be a popular opinion, especially by those people who think they’re immortal, and don’t drive safely. But it’s completely false. It’s the comfortable lie motorists tell themselves because the truth, that they are responsible not just for their own safety, but for safety of every else sharing the same road as themselves, and vice versa, is too much for them to handle.

He goes on to describe his father, who sounds like a very safe and careful driver, who insisted that a properly aware driver will never always be able to avoid any accident, even he meets some idiot driving on the wrong side the road on a blind bend at twice the safe speed limit.

Millions agree with my dad that all deaths on the roads are the fault of the drivers involved, all of the drivers involved. If any one of the drivers involved had been driving like my dad did instead of how they actually did, there’d have been fewer deaths and maybe none at all. It’s tough on passengers who die on the roads. But they could have created a culture of safety instead of nagging dad to go faster, so they too deserved to die, if they did.

Take the argument in the final sentence to it’s logical conclusion, then anyone killed at Southall, Ladbrooke Grove and Hatfield that voted Conservative in the 1992 general election deserved to die as well, for they voted in the government that fragmented the railway and compromised safety.

Road deaths? They’re up to us. This is what everyone thinks, and everyone is right.

Millions of people might believe that. But millions of people believe in horoscopes. Millions of people think the most pressing question in Britain is who’s going to be the next person kicked out of Big Brother. Millions believe everything they read in the Daily Mirror. But that doesn’t make them correct.

BBC NEWS | UK | £7bn scheme to tackle congestion

So New Labour have done a traditional Labour U-turn, and decided to embark on an orgy of road-building. Well, not quite.

I suppose I should be grateful that they’re just widening existing roads rather than building a whole lot of completely new ones, and some of the more feared proposals (like the 12-lane M4 past my parent’s house in Slough) aren’t back on the agenda. From my perspective as a non-driver, new roads make my life worse. Why? Because as soon as somebody builds a new road, out-of-town ‘business parks’ and ‘retail parks’ inevitably spring up alongside them, sucking economic activity out of town and city centres and moving them to places that are a pig to get to by public transport. Just try commuting round the M25 by public transport and you’ll see what I mean.

We’ll get a lot of environmental protests, especially some of the controversial sections of the road along the south coast. I wonder how much the environmentally-insensitive routing by the dessicated accountants at the Department of Transport have to do with this. The reason so many new roads plough though local beauty spots is because their philistine calculations assign a zero value to such things as ancient woodland or downland, while they assign a much higher value to flat, unscenic farmland to which they’ll have to pay higher compensation to the landowners.

BBC NEWS | England | Hereford/Worcs | Safety rule ignored before train crash

Safety procedures were not followed at the scene of a crash between a train and a mini-bus in which three people died on Monday, say investigators.

This is being reported (quite wrongly, in my opinion) as “Three dead in rail collision”. A more accurate headline might be “three dead in road accident”.

The accident didn’t happen on a public road; it’s a crossing between the railway and a farm track on private land. The minibus was carrying farm workers.

What worries me is that some HSE bureacrats will use this tragedy to impose yet more cumbersome safety rules and costs on the railway, which will be borne by rail passengers in higher fares. Why should rail users have to pay to protect vehicle drivers from their own stupidity? If people from the shallow end of the gene pool want to gamble with their lives and those of their passengers to save 30 seconds, there’s not much railway can do about it.

Network Rail said the crossing, its telephone and the warning and instruction signs were all in perfect working condition.

The company said it wrote to the farmer on 17 January 2002, to remind him of the requirement to use the crossing correctly and warned that misuse could lead to prosecution.

If the van driver survived the crash, I hope they throw the book at him. He should be doing jail time for manslaughter.

Reminds me of the accident in Essex a few months back. A tractor driver opened the gate one one side, drove it onto the tracks, then stopped right across the tracks to climb out in order to open the gate on the other side. Then the train cut his tractor in half.

Update: Channel 4 news is reporting that it’s likely the driver was a migrant worker who could not read English. So perhaps part of the blame should fall on the farmer employing these workers for not explaining the crossing rules to them.