Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos
Exactly. It's important that the T has a safety culture, and that they do their best to keep accidents from happening. But at the same time, shit happens. And the thing is, these accidents are so rare (nevermind fatalities, which are even rarer) that they're kind of a non-issue. PTC sounds well and good, but dropping a billion dollars to save one life per year, if that? There needs to be some rigorous cost-benefit analysis, because that $1 billion could probably save a lot more lives doing any number of things. Hell, even South Coast Fail would probably save more lives than that by getting drivers off the road.
Where do I even begin with this horseshit list of false equivalences.
Tally up the liability from the fatal 2008 wreck and the Gov't Center wreck and the cost is already in tens of millions, plus 4 wrecked Green Line cars valued at >$1M each which have to meet the scrapper's torch and will have to be replaced whole as part of the Type 9 order. You don't have to resort to false equivalencies about the price of a human life vs. price of a signal system. It's already taken its chunk of flesh out of the T's coffers in real money. Real money so far...neither of those two cases are closed, neither have had all costs tallied. And if we have more wrecked cars every couple years from these types of rear-enders, the price of the Type 9 order goes up as they have to tack on contingency units to cover wreck victims. The GL isn't swimming in fleet surplus. Those are fucking expensive bumper cars. Already are. No cost hypotheticals about it. A system that averages a high-liability case and "car loss event" on one line at a rate of about once every couple years better damn well figure out how to manage its traffic under load a little more fail-safe than that. This shit gets expensive.
Second...that was not a slow-speed crash. All auto-stop systems (Red/Orange ATO, commuter rail cab signals, Amtrak PTC) have a manual override in case of signal loss or some other contingency. Capped at 5 MPH max. And only after making a dead stop. 5 MPH is your maximum potential energy for a collision with stop protection. 5 MPH will not push a parked two-car GL consist a full 20 feet forward when the brakes on both cars are locked in tandem for a station stop. This was going faster than that. How much so, I don't know...but easily 10-20 MPH physics. The GC wreck was going way faster than that. The D wreck was going way faster still. None of these three incidents happen with that severity under PTC. They don't. They don't even happen with Red/Orange's hardly state-of-the-art ATO system. OK...right there, we have preventability metrics you can crunch vs. the liability bleed and equipment loss.
Third...where are you coming up with this $1B figure? The initial estimates (see p.20:
http://www.bostonmpo.org/bostonmpo/pmt-old/PMT-2.pdf) for CBTC on the Green Line were established at $327M. Be ultra cynical and say they've doubled. There's still not enough lard you can physically pack onto a signal retrofit of the D, Central Subway, Huntington subway, and GLX to arrive at $1B. Track miles set the construction costs for this. That's why the Red Line's 26 miles price out the most expensive of the 4 rapid transit lines for CBTC. That's what's driving NYC Subway's cost estimates. But new GL signals are not a billion-dollar project.
Fourth...this has nothing to do with South Coast FAIL. We'd save way more than 1 life per year extending the subway's operating hours two hours to 2:30am, two nights a week and getting
those people off the road at closing time than we would spending one paltry capital dollar on any new service or any new piece of infrastructure anywhere. Or, hell, probably 1 life per year per every half-hour extra per night. So what's your fucking point?
I understand that safety vs. cost valuation is a tough nut to crack and there's a healthy debate on the limits we can spend for "not one life". So state your case without cloaking it in a turd sandwich of logical fallacies, please.
