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

[Dewey Bradley]

I used to live in Denver.
I was at the station downtown at the 16th and Stout station.
There was a train comeing in to the station, the driver was dingging his 
bell, plus they flash the headlights when they pull in to the station.
There was 2 guys running trying to catch the train, they could have walked 
10 feet to the crosswalk and crossed in front of the train when it was 
stopped.
The one guy was yelling "go go go go"
The other guy ran for it and fell, if the tracks would have been wet, he 
would have been dead.
When the train was stopped, it was over the guy, the front weels of the 
train was less then a foot from him.
That's the kind of stuff people do
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "michael townsend" <mrtownsend at optonline.net>
To: "'Discussion of new quiet cars and pedestrian safety'" 
<quietcars at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 2010 11:45 AM
Subject: [Quietcars] Quieter trains a risk to walkers, USA Today, 04/05/10


> 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.
>
>
>
>
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