I don’t know what other takes this person has but this doesn’t seem unreasonable.
They clearly acknowledge that trains can’t stop quickly and are only asking why there isn’t tech for earlier detection of obstacles. This is something I’ve occasionally wondered myself and whether or not there could be for instance unmanned small drone trains driving a couple of km ahead of the manned train feeding a video signal for the driver to know what is coming up.
Nothing about this post indicates they think cars ought to not have to stop at crossings, only the reality that obstacles for trains still occur in the real world and it is possible for us to build better safety systems if we actually want to.
I imagine it’s because trains take SO long to stop that the tech would need to activate long, long, long before the barriers go down in order to have any meaningful effect.
and then all trains slow down to a crawl within a five kilometer vicinity of every crossing because some guy stopped his car at the crossing for a bit three minutes ago and has since left. the chain effect being that all trains near any populated area move at an average of 25kph
It does seem unreasonable. It’s way easier and more failproof to have a big swinging bar to sweep everything out of the way of the train than it would ever be to slow the train down- and if we’re assuming “the reality of obstacles that exist”, a bit more time to react is not going to change the existance of those obstacles.
I don’t know what other takes this person has but this doesn’t seem unreasonable.
They clearly acknowledge that trains can’t stop quickly and are only asking why there isn’t tech for earlier detection of obstacles. This is something I’ve occasionally wondered myself and whether or not there could be for instance unmanned small drone trains driving a couple of km ahead of the manned train feeding a video signal for the driver to know what is coming up.
Nothing about this post indicates they think cars ought to not have to stop at crossings, only the reality that obstacles for trains still occur in the real world and it is possible for us to build better safety systems if we actually want to.
I imagine it’s because trains take SO long to stop that the tech would need to activate long, long, long before the barriers go down in order to have any meaningful effect.
and then all trains slow down to a crawl within a five kilometer vicinity of every crossing because some guy stopped his car at the crossing for a bit three minutes ago and has since left. the chain effect being that all trains near any populated area move at an average of 25kph
Yeah, that’s kinda what I would assume.
It does seem unreasonable. It’s way easier and more failproof to have a big swinging bar to sweep everything out of the way of the train than it would ever be to slow the train down- and if we’re assuming “the reality of obstacles that exist”, a bit more time to react is not going to change the existance of those obstacles.