Our thoughts today are with the families of those lost in the rush hour DC Metro crash.
When I lived in the District, I regularly took this red line train between NOAA’s Silver Spring offices and downtown. Several colleagues and friends were onboard, including among the injured.
May this tragedy never happen again.
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:49 am
Accidents will happen again, of course.
But it’s hard to see why two passenger trains would end up on the same track headed toward each other more than, say, once in a thousand years, considering how many ways we have of preventing it.
It’s hard to believe, and I don’t think we should have to hear of this again in our lifetimes.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
June 23rd, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Glenn,
to clarify, they were headed in the same direction, not toward each other. the first train was stopped waiting to go into the Metro station, and was struck from behind by a train that apparently wasn’t under sufficient control. Metro runs trains faily close together during rush hour so to keep things moving they use a computer control system without the train operator doing anything. If that system failed as the crach would seem to suggest, there migh tnot be enough time for the operator to initate a manual stop.
June 23rd, 2009 at 1:28 pm
The trains were not heading toward each other. The first train was stopped, the second train was following it. This is how ALL metro trains run. Most if not all subways run like that.ie; two lines with multiple trains running the same direction on parellel traks. Where did you get the idea they were heading ‘towards’ each other? The reporting has been terrible, but some of the facts as reported are just not adding up
June 23rd, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Ah, thanks Philip.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
June 23rd, 2009 at 2:37 pm
If that system failed as the crach would seem to suggest, there migh tnot be enough time for the operator to initate a manual stop.
That is rather disturbing. This and the Airbus accident (fly by wire) out of Brazil demonstrate our reliance on computer systems to run (and protect) our lives. Now, it may be that the number of accidents have decreased due to this reliance, but there seems (to me at least) to be a need for an additional layer of safety above and beyond that primary system.
June 23rd, 2009 at 3:34 pm
The use of computer control raises all sorts of interesting issues. On the one hand, there’s no question that a properly programmed computer system will always be more reliable than a human operator. On the other hand, there are a million ways a computer system can fail, many of them really stupid. Use of redundancy helps with a lot of them, but the real killers are the unanticipated screwups. What happens when two or three minor failures combine in an unanticipated manner? It appears that something of this order was responsible for the Air France crash; the incorrect readings from the pitot tubes started a chain reaction that led to the structural failure of the plane. I wouldn’t be surprised if the software already had protections against grossly incorrect airspeed readings, but no protections against mildly incorrect readings.
A slightly different problem lay behind the crash of that Turkish airliner at Schipol recently: there was some sort of mixup with the computer radar altimeter that caused it to retract the landing gear. But pilot error also played a role, as I recall.
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:25 pm
I ride the redline to and from work everyday, from the NIH to Dupont. It was strangely quite on the platforms during rush-hour this morning.
Anyone interested in learning more about the wreck and the controversy over the outdated train car involved in the accident can go to the DCist website.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:59 pm
The New York City Transit Authority is trying to implement a computer control system similar to the Washington Metro’s. It already has in operation at night a computer control system for the “L” subway line which connects the Chelsea, Manhattan section with the trendy Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, and the far less desirable Brooklyn neighborhoods of East New York and Canarsie. I hope the New York City Transit Authority will study closely this accident before proceeding with further improvements to its computer control system.
Sadly the New York City subway system has had its own share of fatal subway accidents, stretching as far back as the early decades of the 20th Century.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:38 am
It’s very sad, but I suspect we will see more train accidents in the future. Short attention spans and too much reliance on machines doesn’t help. Bringing a mobile phone into the control booth ought to be a criminal offense; they feature prominently in many incidents.
@TomJoe: The whole machine vs. human thing has been going on for at least 30 years in aviation. Programmers make mistakes too and there are a few instances where a programming fault resulted in the machine causing a disaster. Trains were the next big thing for automating to reduce accidents. Only the person in the control booth would see what’s ahead of the train so there’s really only one person who can tug on that emergency brake line; if they’re distracted (even just looking out the side window for a second) they might miss the opportunity to put on the brakes.
I suspect psychology might also play a part; you get so used to machines doing the right thing that it takes you too long to believe that the machine isn’t doing what it’s meant to do in that particular tragic instance. In the case of a stopped train, there should have been a signal further up the line telling the operator to slow down and prepare to stop – was there a signal failure or did the operator not notice the signal? Another option (as in the case of Steve Fosset) is that the operator is incapacitated by stroke/heart attack/ epileptic fit / whatever you can imagine.
June 24th, 2009 at 7:31 am
My prayers are with those passengers and families.
June 24th, 2009 at 11:58 am
It’s tragic that this happened. But how about some context to keep this in perspective? A commuter train crash is news-worthy because it is so rare. Over 100 people die, on average, every day in car crashes in this country.
“Never again” is irrational; life is risky.