Disclaimer: I've worked on automated transportation systems and have worked on SIL-4, realtime/safety-critical systems for the trains systems of Europe and most

Disclaimer: I've worked on automated transportation systems and have worked on SIL-4, realtime/safety-critical systems for the trains systems of Europe and most of the western world. Germany has one of the best rail transportation infrastructures in the world. You can travel around the German state on trains in a single day, in much comfort, and hundreds of thousands of people are delivered to their destinations with safety and security, every single hour. What they also have, is complacency and decadence, and you could say a lot about how the bureaucracy of companies such as Siemens and Thales allows this decadence to flow throughout the infrastructure. Accidents like this happen today because of human error, through and through. No matter how much we automate safety, in the end it depends on having a conscious human watching the systems and ensuring that things stay, literally, on the rails. It is far too soon to try to understand what went wrong in this case - but I can only say that the fact that an accident occurred, in spite of the extremely impressive infrastructure put in place to keep it safe, means simply: someone screwed up.