alt Hacker News>I live in Spain, this year we had 4 derailments for a total of 48 deaths and 195 injured.
Which, to be clear, is a considerable outlier. Highest since 2013 and about double the deaths and 4x the injured of a "normal" year.
Not to mention that trains are far safer than automobiles too.
>The USA has had 0 passengers killed or injured from train accidents this year.
Is this a fantastic, magical year or something? The normal number seems to be around 800 a year? https://www.kochandbrim.com/study-train-accident-deaths/
Replies
retired • today at 12:20 AM
Your number includes suicides, trespassing and more. Only 24 passenger deaths in a ten year period.
> Not to mention that trains are far safer than automobiles too.
This claim is situationally true, but not universally so like many people seem to believe. For example, Brightline rail service in Florida has been operating since 2017 and averages (by my math) 29.8 deaths / 100M passenger-miles, while the road system in Florida averages 0.89 deaths / 100M passenger-miles. Those deaths are mostly not suicides, and imo we should treat pedestrian deaths from trains as substantially more morally weighty than passenger deaths, since it's a victim that didn't opt-in to the risk.
For what it's worth, the unusual spike in Spain train crashes this year seems to have pushed them barely over the fatality numbers of Spanish cars (0.91 deaths/100M pax-mi vs 0.73 for cars) but that's pretty clearly an outlier.
If you measure per vehicle-mile rather than per passenger-mile I'm pretty sure trains are always way more dangerous, although that's a less fair comparison.