This surprises me so much I feel like it must be incorrect or not apples-to-apples somehow. Amtrak has fatalities of 0.43 per billion passenger miles (20/100M = 200/B) according to the WaPo. I don’t believe that Florida could build a train this much deadlier than a normal one, even if they tried. (These same figures give 7 deaths/billion car passenger miles, which is similar to what this post uses.)
Imagine you’re an evil engineer, and the devil tells you to make a train that’s 500 times more deadly than average. How would you even do that? What’s the mechanistic explanation for how Brightline is this deadly? For now, I roll to disbelieve.
My best guess is you’re somehow massively undercounting the passenger numbers by taking a per-week figure as a total or something, but I’m not sure.
The WaPo article appears to refer to passenger fatalities per billion passenger miles, not total fatalities. For comparison, trains in the European Union in 2021 apparently had ca. 0.03 passenger fatalities per billion passenger miles, but almost 0.3 total fatalities per million train miles.
My guess is the overall Amtrak number is the outlier, including lots of miles of open land. Perhaps relevant for assessing safety/mile when you’d otherwise drive or fly it, but not as relevant for assessing safety/risk in urban areas.
I’ve ridden amtrack from New Orleans to the middle of mississippi, and there was no point where it looked like a pedestrian could get to the track if they tried- alternating between abandoned looking industrial districts and wilderness the whole way. Also mostly went about 35 miles an hour.
This surprises me so much I feel like it must be incorrect or not apples-to-apples somehow. Amtrak has fatalities of 0.43 per billion passenger miles (20/100M = 200/B) according to the WaPo. I don’t believe that Florida could build a train this much deadlier than a normal one, even if they tried. (These same figures give 7 deaths/billion car passenger miles, which is similar to what this post uses.)
Imagine you’re an evil engineer, and the devil tells you to make a train that’s 500 times more deadly than average. How would you even do that? What’s the mechanistic explanation for how Brightline is this deadly? For now, I roll to disbelieve.
My best guess is you’re somehow massively undercounting the passenger numbers by taking a per-week figure as a total or something, but I’m not sure.
The WaPo article appears to refer to passenger fatalities per billion passenger miles, not total fatalities. For comparison, trains in the European Union in 2021 apparently had ca. 0.03 passenger fatalities per billion passenger miles, but almost 0.3 total fatalities per million train miles.
Run the train where there are 500x the people?
My guess is the overall Amtrak number is the outlier, including lots of miles of open land. Perhaps relevant for assessing safety/mile when you’d otherwise drive or fly it, but not as relevant for assessing safety/risk in urban areas.
I’ve ridden amtrack from New Orleans to the middle of mississippi, and there was no point where it looked like a pedestrian could get to the track if they tried- alternating between abandoned looking industrial districts and wilderness the whole way. Also mostly went about 35 miles an hour.
Amtrack also travels fairly slowly.
From what I can tell the rate in Europe is around 10x lower than that Amtrak number and falling over time.