But there was a recent incident in Germany as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgrain_train_derailment), which is somewhat similar to the earlier accident in Spain this year. Targeting high value projects, while not paying for proper maintenance is not something that only happens in a single country.
> but you can't say that it has ever happened in Japan.
That sounds very unlikely to me, and in fact Wikipedia indicates otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigaraki_train_disaster
This you? Who's fault is it then? You said the tech doesn't exist (lets take that at face-value for the sake of your argument), so then if not tech, then what? You're just left with people. So are you saying it is their fault or not? Or is it just nobody's?
In addition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50297950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50293093
It's a mixed bag. That can also cause safety violations, they were suicidal incidents, because punctuality is placed over safety, in Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
Japan railway crew have stricter procedures when they are alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling
Current operation of a train is basically self-driving and supervising driver. So if you suggest "just use self-driving", you make the system less safe, not more, because it means just getting rid of the human supervisor. This is not currently done, because it would be too insecure. It might be done in the future, but rather because less safety is going to be accepted in favor for getting rid of the costly human.
A self-driving train will happily cause a crash, if the target is "drive with high-speed in that segment currently occupied by another train". The issue is that that becomes a target, not that there is a human in the loop.
Sure, if you allow trains to ignore safety completely, then accidents will occur. That is a ridiculous statement.
I don't think that's relevant to trains. Cars can avoid a collision much more easily than trains can. Cars can swerve, and if they are at a distance at which line of sight tells them they will hit an obstacle, they are moving slow enough to stop before hitting that obstacle. Trains have to stay on tracks, and they need up to 4 kilometers to stop moving.
The constraints are very different, so the solutions and tradeoffs will be different too.
That is completely false. PTC does that, and we've had it for several decades. There are several self-driving cars operating in the world right now. I have never heard of a PTC system causing accidents; those occur in places where the system isn't required (like entering Grand Central).
You keep pretending that avoiding train collisions is too magical to achieve with current tech, but train traffic is easy to limit (but slightly harder to optimize), and systems exist to do that, because rail is unique amongst all forms of travel: if you drop speed to zero for any trains at risk of collision, they are safe. Planes will plummet; most cars are human-operated and you can get rear-ended, etc.
I think you are misunderstanding the sentence you quoted.
It says something about the safety of self-driving cars. That is they don’t meet the standards required for railways. In other words the expected safety for a self-driving CAR is lower than the expected safety of a RAILWAY. (Caps for emphasis, sorry about the shouting.)
Your comment reads as if the quote claims that we cannot make “self-driving trains”. It does not say that.
> You keep pretending that avoiding train collisions is too magical to achieve with current tech
I don’t think that they do that. Definietly not in the comment you responded to.
And they somehow work with radar, lidar and GPS from inside the train? No they work with classical block based systems and on signalboxes. So all the safety systems are outside of a train.
> You keep pretending that avoiding train collisions is too magical to achieve with current tech
Huh?? Railway interlocking exists for more than a century. It's very safe and I didn't wrote anything contradicting that.