<story><title>How we slowed the subway down</title><url>https://homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2022/12/21/how-we-slowed-the-subway-down/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hristov</author><text>&amp;quot;Sure you save some lives but how many will be late!&amp;quot; I do not like this math. For example the accident may not be once per century. And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life.&lt;p&gt;The answer is that they should improve the technology so that the system is safe and faster.</text></item><item><author>dzdt</author><text>After an operator-error derailment on the commuter rail line I frequently ride, the response of the NTSB was to require the railroad de-prioritize on-time performance and increase schedule times. As a frequent rider on the route I would much rather have my 15 minutes per day back and risk a once-per-century fatal accident. But the risk-averse bureaucracy we&amp;#x27;ve built doesn&amp;#x27;t make such calculations with a balance like that: they prioritize safety above all else never mind the detriments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quotemstr</author><text>&amp;gt; I do not like this math&lt;p&gt;Many policy difficulties arise from unwillingness to trade-offs between &amp;quot;sacred&amp;quot; and non-&amp;quot;sacred&amp;quot; values. It&amp;#x27;s easy to say that just one life is worth an arbitrary amount of non-fatal inconvenience to an arbitrary number of people. It&amp;#x27;s the cheap, easy platitude anyone can summon in a meeting. It feels good to say. Simple. Strong. Righteous.&lt;p&gt;But the world doesn&amp;#x27;t work this way. Mere life does not, in fact, have infinite, overriding value. Infrastructure engineering is not a morality play. It&amp;#x27;s a complex set of trade-offs, some involving safety. In a big system like public transit, as crass as it might be to say explicitly, the optimal number of deaths is seldom zero. Safety and utility are not, as the moralists might insist, incommensurable. They in fact exist on the same plane, and to build things that are effective and efficient, we need to trade them off against each other. Failure to do so leads to cowardly paralysis.&lt;p&gt;In other words: yes, we absolutely should accept some statistical nonzero risk of injury to save time or money in the overwhelmingly common case, because these things &lt;i&gt;matter&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>
<story><title>How we slowed the subway down</title><url>https://homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2022/12/21/how-we-slowed-the-subway-down/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hristov</author><text>&amp;quot;Sure you save some lives but how many will be late!&amp;quot; I do not like this math. For example the accident may not be once per century. And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life.&lt;p&gt;The answer is that they should improve the technology so that the system is safe and faster.</text></item><item><author>dzdt</author><text>After an operator-error derailment on the commuter rail line I frequently ride, the response of the NTSB was to require the railroad de-prioritize on-time performance and increase schedule times. As a frequent rider on the route I would much rather have my 15 minutes per day back and risk a once-per-century fatal accident. But the risk-averse bureaucracy we&amp;#x27;ve built doesn&amp;#x27;t make such calculations with a balance like that: they prioritize safety above all else never mind the detriments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kccqzy</author><text>When the train is often late, it simply pushes people to drive more, and depending on the specifics driving on the highway could very well be less safe. Ergo, it results in a net loss of lives. This is pointed out near the end of the article.</text></comment>