Get It Quietly

Football, bollocks and a bit of poker if you're lucky.

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Location: Enfield, London, United Kingdom

Saturday, February 24, 2007

A Serious Post

When I opened up my browser this morning I saw a big headline about a train accident, one dead, five "severe casualties" and several injured. Someone on the mob forum also posted a link to the story. I'm not making fun of anything here and my sympathies to anyone involved. All I want to say is that fifteen people die on UK roads and lord knows how many are injured EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

Rail travel is far, far safer than road and even air travel is the safest of all, mile for mile. Where are the headlines about the DAILY carnage on the roads and why aren't there big enquiries about that. Why isn't more money spent on educating people as to the danger of reckless driving and on sorting out the worst road accident blackspots. Accidents on public transport are blown up way out of proportion compared to what's happening on the roads.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Air travel wins, not just because of the huge quantity of money spent on safety measures and the highly regulated way the traffic moves, but also because aeroplanes travel a great proportion of their mileage in a situation where a fatality is practically impossible (ie cruising 30000 ft away from the nearest hard object). And note that Concorde went from being the safest aircraft in the world to one of the least safe in the space of a few tragic minutes a few years ago.

Car fatalities are common and hence not news, so don't get in the papers. Perverse I agree, but there it is.

The newsworthy story about that crash is the truly stupendous performance of the train itself and the frankly heroic actions of the driver.

10:39 AM  

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