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Out of curiosity - per day or week: how many people ride the DC Metro, how many people die on the Metro, how many people drive, and how many people die driving?
by saulrh 10y ago
Out of curiosity - per day or week: how many people ride the DC Metro, how many people die on the Metro, how many people drive, and how many people die driving? Metro services have the same issue as airlines in that a non-issue failure rate ends up reviled in the news because there's the same name attached to every single incident and everybody is completely failing to group up the alternatives to examine them.
Bad service I can agree with - that's something that needs to be fixed. More money, supportive legislation that makes it easier for them to acquire capability, etcetera. But unless the Metro is killing someone literally every day I doubt its fatality rate approaches cars.
- acdha 10y agoIt's definitely safer. The problem is that it was even better during the period where they skimped on maintenance and so part of what drives the reaction are the million people who remember when you never heard of things like this happening.
- massysett 10y agoMetro's problem is gross and chronic mismanagement. Not a single fatality or injury on Metro has been attributed to lack of money. So they do not need more money or legislation to make it easier for them to acquire anything. A common bogeyman among Metro apologists is "lack of dedicated funding," even though no one has shown any link between this lack of dedicated funding and any of the problems Metro is facing. The airlines are an excellent example of how regulation and safety consciousness can succeed in creating an extremely safe means of transportation. Causes of mishaps are tracked down and fixed. Meanwhile Metro kills people due to gross mismanagement. I do not think "more people die driving" is an excuse for gross mismanagement in a government agency.
- mikeash 10y agoI ran the numbers on this a while ago, and Metro averages about one fatality per year (looking at the last ten years, but they're clumped, so this is not necessarily accurate) and that makes them about 10x safer than cars for the equivalent number of passenger-miles. So yes, they're safer, but they wouldn't need to be killing people every day to approach the level of cars, once a month would do it. What's worrying is that there are a lot of non-fatal incidents (fires and such) which avoid killing people purely by luck. If they don't take action, those are going to start killing people more frequently. Thankfully they are taking action, finally. Unfortunately that action is going to involve some pretty major shutdowns over the next year.
- scott_s 10y agoDC's Metro really is in a uniquely bad position, though: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/federal-agency-orders-new-safety-steps-after-metros-handling-of-thursday-fire/2016/05/07/2e44b6aa-1467-11e6-8967-7ac733c56f12_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/federal-agency-orders-n...