Going Viral: Spanish train derailing [VIDEO]

I call bullshit on the “observer” who’s trying to minimise the driver’s responsibility for this disaster. Anyone can see that the train was travelling at a ridiculous speed – double the limit for that bend – and the driver has previous form for this kind of thing.

The tracks look to be well constructed and maintained, there’s a nice camber on the bend, and remarkably, every other train that’s travelled on it has managed to stay on the rails – despite alleged corruption (mind you if donating to political parties means you’re corrupt, half of business in New Zealand is corrupt – they give money to all parties).

Mentioning “security systems not in place” is a complete herring rouge – is the observer suggesting bandits took over the train and deliberately drove it at twice the speed it should be? No, well what’s the point of mentioning it.

The train driver (engineer) is like the pilot of a plane – they’re responsible for the safety and well-being of their passengers. If the wagons were of the wrong type, he should’ve been aware of it and either refused to drive it, or moderated his speed to a safe level. Either he didn’t inspect the train and carriages before departing (criminal negligence) or he did, and drove at twice the speed for that bend anyway (criminal recklessness).

Why can’t people just own their fuckups without trying to blame big corporates or the Gummint?

Corruption and fraud are pretty much inherent in commuter rail “investments”. It is a rare event indeed when any such investment ends up costing less than double the original “studies” and ends up carrying more than 2/3 the original forecast ridership.

I am not exaggerating, either; I am going by Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg’s papers which analyse these things in a large international data set. He uses the delightfully academic terms “Strategic misrepresentation” and “Optimism bias” to describe what is going on.

An excellent paper to start with that has a huge references list, is Wenleng Chen’s paper “Analysis of Rail Transit Project Selection Bias”.

It is noteworthy too that Meyer, Kain and Wohl authored a massive study in the early 1960’s that presented all the evidence and concluded that commuter rail had had its day. Fred Kain in particular has continued authoring papers since, that show how the situation has steadily worsened against commuter rail systems. The fraud and corruption have had to get worse and worse as time has gone on, to “compensate” for this. Len Brown’s Akl Rail Loop is an obvious object lesson.

The heavily unionized monopoly model is responsible for much of the inefficiency, but even so commuter rail is a dead loss sunk cost burden on the economy in almost all cases everywhere in the world. Hong Kong might be the single exception.