[Quietcars] Quieter trains a risk to walkers, USA Today, 04/05/10

[michael townsend]

Good morning.  Mike T here with a few comments on the below article.  Thanks
for reading my comments.  

I am increasingly disheartened by the number of articles that are written
that blame the quieter cars, and now trains and buses for fatalities that
could have been avoided due to negligence on the part of pedestrians.  

I do know of a person who was killed by a New Jersey Transit train in a
local town.  He also was walking on or nearby a commuter train track while
listening to his music containment device, not an Ipod, by the way.  

It is a shame that parents won't stress to their kids that this is as
dangerous as driving drunk, as when you have the device plugged into your
ears at an earsplitting volume, as most of the listeners to these devices
do, you can't hear a damn thing around you.  

As evidenced by my cousin's 21 year old son mark Jr., when he's out and
about, I can hear the music clearly from his Ipod and he can't hear his
grandmother talking to him over the sound of music.  

He plays his music loudly when he drives as well and doesn't pay attention
to the road and drives extremely fast.  

As the article also clearly stated, engineers who drive these quieter trains
are dramatically effected by the fact that they've hit and possibly killed
persons walking along or too near the tracks, and very often their lives are
totally changed by what has happened while they were piloting the trains.  I
suspect that people who hit pedestrians with quieter cars, be they hybrids
or other gasoline or diesel-powered vehicles, may have similarly been
effected.  I'd like to see some numbers generated along these lines as well,
for I know that nobody with a clear mind and good conscience would be able
to sleep well at night knowing that they have hit someone and killed or
injured them through no negligence of their own.  And, the families of
accident victims cannot rest without also clearing their minds, be it
through the administration of proper justice and due diligence to either
exonerate the inured or deceased family members whom they have lost or to
find out that the death or injury of the loved one was conversely not the
fault of the operator of a train, bus or motor vehicle involved in the
accident.

Thanks for sharing this disturbing article, but, I believe that safety works
both ways here.  The industry complies with quieter cars on the rails; buses
and trucks as well as passenger vehicles that are mandated to uphold lesser
noise levels and are taken to task for it.  So now, let's go after the Ipod
wearers, the cellular phone users and those who choose to ignore the warning
and danger signs when they violate the law with a big fat fine and jail
time.  I think that all to often, we blame instead of first trying to take
the steps to educate ourselves.  Unfortunately, in some cases, the end
result of not paying attention to the law or to common sense is the fact
that people are killed or seriously injured due to their own negligence.  

 

Quieter trains a risk to walkers

By Larry Copeland

Pedestrian deaths remain steady even as fatalities from train-vehicle
crashes decline

Anna Marie Stickel, 14, missed the school bus that morning. So she took a
shortcut along some railroad tracks that made her trek to school about 10
minutes; going the long, safe way around would have taken 30-40 minutes, her

mother says.

Listening to her iPod as she and a friend walked along the tracks in
January, Anna Marie of Middle River, Md., was hit and killed by an Amtrak
train.

Anna Marie's friend, who was not listening to music, heard the train just in

time to jump to safety, says Anna Marie's mother, Tara Stickel, 38. They are

deadly quiet," she says of today's trains and tracks. My baby girl had no
idea. I know for a fact she hadn't been told how dangerous they are. And I
am just as much to blame for that. I never saw those tracks as a threat.

Rail-safety advocates and federal authorities are trying to determine how to

reduce fatalities involving trains and pedestrians, which far outstrip
deaths in train-vehicle collisions.

Over the past 10 years, the number of deaths involving trains and motor
vehicles has dropped 42% to 248. In the same period, deaths involving
pedestrians have fallen  6% to 434, the Federal Railroad Administration
says. That's (incidents with pedestrians) the No. 1 cause of death in the
railroad industry," FRA spokesman Rob Kulat says.

Rail-safety advocates are especially concerned about teenagers killed
accidentally by trains in hangout spots on or near the tracks. We are
working so hard to try to figure out a way to turn this around," says Marmie

Edwards of Operation Lifesaver, an international rail-safety advocacy group.

It may be that in some parts of the country, the railroad tracks are a
little bit secluded," Edwards says. So (teens) think it's a place where they

can go to just hang out without other people knowing what they're doing. 
Sometimes, when you tell this age group this is not where you should go,
that's where they're going to want to go

A quiet danger

Trains are a lot quieter than they used to be.

Rails are built in longer, continuous sections of track, so the familiar
"clackety-clack" of wheels on the track is gone in many places. The trains
themselves are quieter. Communities across the USA have enacted "quiet
zones," where operators are barred from sounding their horns during certain
times of day.

That quiet is one reason the number of pedestrians killed by trains has
remained steady. Another reason: Many people wear headphones or talk on
cellphones while ambling along railroad tracks.

When you have train tracks this near high schools or middle schools and
students use it as a shortcut, you really need to educate children on what's

going on," says Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., who helped set up
train-safety assemblies at Anna Marie's high school.

People take shortcuts across the tracks. Hunters walk along them. People
ride all-terrain vehicles on them and sit on them to fish.

Many people simply fail to understand how dangerous trains are, says Richard

Ratcliffe, executive director of Maryland Operation Lifesaver, which puts on

safety lessons for students and others.

We tell them the train overhangs on each side by at least 3 feet, and they
can overhang by as much as 12," Ratcliffe says. We tell them they don't
build trains like they did, and they're a lot quieter. We explain why
walking or walking the dog or hanging out on tracks is so dangerous and why
it's against the law.

Looking at suicides

It's unclear how many of the deaths are intentional. Kulat says the FRA does

not track suicides but estimates that 20% to 50% of train-pedestrian deaths
involve people taking their own lives. Railroads reporting a death soon will

have to indicate whether it was a suicide.

Of 33,000 annual suicides in the USA, 1%-2% occur on railroads. Suicide by
rail is "highly lethal, and it's accessible," says Matthew Wintersteen,
clinical psychologist at Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson University and a
member of the Pennsylvania Youth Suicide Prevention Initiative. If we can
restrict access to lethal means, we can reduce the number of suicides. The
problem, of course, is ... can we restrict public access to the train
tracks?

Among recent intentional teen deaths:

*Two girls in Delaware killed themselves in February by stepping in front of

a high-speed Amtrak train. The girls had made a suicide pact, according to
police.

*A high school freshman in Pleasanton, Calif., stepped in front of a Union
Pacific train near her school in February.

Kulat says a freight train going 60 mph takes about a mile to stop after the

emergency brake is applied. You can't stop. You can't turn, obviously. You
just have to watch it happen. ... There's the trauma that train engineers go

through (after hitting someone). They go through post-traumatic stress
counseling. The one thing they talk about is that they see the people's eyes

right before they hit them. A lot of those engineers don't return to work.