What are the odds of all these happening in such quick succession? Was there some kind of regulatory change that just came into effect?
Oh wait, I'm hearing that the Chinese balloon was dropping anti-train countermeasures. Truly a dastardly act
That is good to know, but I'm not actually worried about it. It's still much safer than traveling by car. Plus I get to have a beer, listen to tunes, and stare into people's back yards.
I was trying to tell people on twitter taht this happens all the time because America is a trash heap country.
In 2018 Europe had 1721 serious rail incidents. 57% of them were about people ending up on the track, another 26% were accidents involving level crossings. So while there might be more than 20 derailments it's still way less than the US.
someone please find sources for this data, I'd love to have comparison data like this
found a few basic use stats by country on wiki, but nothing about derailments or safety
This is the figure for the USA number. 1704 a year.
This is the figure for the EU number. I appear to have remembered the exact number incorrectly. If you check the charts mentioned, which you will find for download here you can see that the average amount of train derailments per year in the EU from 2010-2021 is 81, with the highest number being 100 in 2013, and the lowest number 62 in 2016. The countries on record with the highest amount of derailments were the UK and Poland, so notably the rate of derailments dropped by 20% when the UK left. In the past couple of years, Poland got better and Turkey are the worst, Turkey counted for a bit over 1/3rd of the derailments in the dataset. I'm not sure why Turkey is included in this dataset in particular, I assume that its some sort of transportation law that makes them integrated. If you remove Turkey and the UK from the dataset entirely it comes out to 51 derailments on average over the past 10ish years. It should be noted that from 2006-2008 the EU+Turkey had around 420 derailments on average, by 2009 they halved it, and by 2010 it was dropped to 89.
I do remember diving into it at one point and also looked into China, which had similar rates to the EU, but slightly less. Which is impressive considering the size of their country.
You are supposed to replace rails every 5-10 years. Which most of the EU does and the US absolutely doesn't do, except in heavily trafficked areas.
There are no regulations requiring replacement, only maintenance which leaves a lot up to each rail company. Which means they take the cheapest route and do nothing until something happens.
That includes minor derailment where a wheel pops off and immediately back on, but there are still hundreds of major derailment a year and that is unacceptable.
USA has like 1.6k derailments a year. EU has like 20
This is the answer, just like every country has sent various types of stealth aircraft to monitor every other country, it's just that when you need a panic you just point out how your enemy is doing the same thing you're doing (or in the US's case, a tiny fraction of what you're doing)
edit: read it wrong. 1.6k is obviously waaay more than 20, but the point is the same. US News was not covering this stuff before, now they are. So it'll look like there's some sudden catastrophic change, when really we're just rotting to death as usual. But since it looks catastrophic and sudden, and they've made the balloon stuff look that way too, this will be used to blame China or justify war or something like that.
Lmao tweet in the comments of "omg are we under attack" no dipshit our infrastructure is collapsing, you live in a third world country wearing a Gucci coat mfer.
That or we are about to do something stupid in the Ukraine conflict and start a nuclear war
So :lmayo: :pete-eat: how would you describe your achievements as the nation's transportation secretary?
Can't wait for him to act indignant when he's asked this in some interview no mainstream news outlet bothers to show
He's gonna steal beto millennial pandering and go for 420 train derailments and reduce it to 69 derailments under his presidency. (He will bow to corporate pressure and have the shittiest 777 derailments per annum)
I absolutely love that he got the most unimportant and irrelevant cabinet position that exists, and he's fucking it up so badly:chefs-kiss:
You're laughing? Trains are being harmed and you're LAUGHING?? :youre-laughing:
The purpose of the spy balloon was so that Beijing could get front row seats to the collapse of the United States
the biden administration just got done crushing a rail strike where massively overworked and sleep deprived workers wanted fewer hours (this was their main demand)
Many of them were asking for UNPAID time off, and even that was too much for the railway companies to give.
also the CEO-driven "precision scheduled railroading " paradigm has led to a situation where trains are now too long to pass each other with side tracks and train crews are made to work double shifts for
no good reason(to save porky %25).
There are on average something like 20 train derailments per day in the US. A lot of these aren't serious (IIRC backing off the tracks in a yard counts), but it's still super high and it's only going to get worse.
Why would China do this to us when our infrastructure already sucks so much?
puts on tinfoil hat
a certain south african supervillain is sabotaging all the rails to make way for his hyperloop
THE BALLOONS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL YOU ALL STOP ASKING ABOUT THE TRAINS
WE WILL SHOOT BALLOONS AGAIN, AND THEY MIGHT EVEN BE CHINESE
helium balloons with Chinese restaurant take out menus taped to them swarm America's radar
The trains just want to roam free, unconstrained by restrictive tracks put down by society.
Are this and the balloon thing connected? I'm beginning to suspect some sort of conspiracy here.
