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Trains have had dead man's switches for nearly 50 years at least. You can't give people the job of paying attention if there is nothing to pay attention to 80%,
by jimktrains2 8y ago
Trains have had dead man's switches for nearly 50 years at least. You can't give people the job of paying attention if there is nothing to pay attention to 80%, 90% of the time. It's not reasonable to me to expect someone to be at peak alertness while doing nothing at all.
- smileysteve 8y agoIt is reasonable, however, that they not be watching a cell phone when they're being paid to be a backup driver. The optics for the driver were really bad. They weren't just not paying attention, they weren't "just" eating and drinking (something accepted in American driving for the last 60 years), they weren't staring blankly into the desert, they didn't fall asleep. No, they were doing the one thing that has received the most public messaging for the last decade.
- jimktrains2 8y ago> The optics for the driver were really bad. Oh don't get me wrong. I don't feel like the driver is blameless. I just mean that people not paying attention when they don't have to do anything isn't a new problem or one without what seems to be an adequate solution.
- WillPostForFood 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Philadelphia_train_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Philadelphia_train_derail... dead man's switches don't activate when the engineer is simply distracted.