Poll of the Day > Another train derailed in ohio

(+) Yeah! (+)

fix your shit

What? Decades of neglecting rail infrastructure in favour of pushing transportation costs on to taxpayers in the form of road maintenance is having actual consequences? Who could possibly have seen this coming?

A train derailment happens in the US on average every 8 hours.

https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1632213874639355905

adjl posted...

Decades of neglecting rail infrastructure in favour of pushing transportation costs on to taxpayers in the form of road maintenance is having actual consequences?

Those roads are also neglected, since the road money barely ever makes it to the roads.

But it's far more than just the infrastructure. Even if we had pristine, new infrastructure, there'd still be issues.

After the cold war ended people just stopped caring.

Trump administration spent 4 years slashing railway safety standards this is the result

Count_Drachma posted...

Those roads are also neglected, since the road money barely ever makes it to the roads.

Road money makes it to the roads, it just isn't enough for the sheer number of roads because sprawling, car-centric infrastructure simply isn't a sustainable model (and never will be).

Count_Drachma posted...

But it's far more than just the infrastructure. Even if we had pristine, new infrastructure, there'd still be issues.

Trains don't derail from rails that are built properly for them. Period. Now, that includes a whole lot of much broader consideration than "is this rail new?", including "how gentle should this curve be, based on how fast trains will go here?", "how heavy will these trains be?", and "are operators trained properly to understand the limitations of the infrastructure?", but all of that is part of improving rail infrastructure. It's not simply a matter of "build more rails."

papercup posted...

A train derailment happens in the US on average every 8 hours.

yes indeed

You are telling me the us government, going back decades, has been completely incompetent and ignorant towards the mess they made? Naw, couldn't be

As a former conductor for Norfolk Southern, those trains derail all the fucking time. They just had one prominent one followed by another relatively large one and now everyone in the Facebook comments has turned into conspiracy theorists. An NS conductor just got killed in Cleveland a couple days ago, and a CSX train just derailed in WV from hitting a rockslide.

adjl posted...

Road money makes it to the roads, it just isn't enough for the sheer number of roads because sprawling, car-centric infrastructure simply isn't a sustainable model (and never will be).

It's almost as if suburban life is pretty much the worst system we've ever come up with, and we've known this for years.

VampireCoyote posted...

Trump administration spent 4 years slashing railway safety standards this is the result

Biden also should have backed the unions and not the corrupt railway corporations.