Road safety rather than rail safety

Yesterday, seven people died when a minibus carrying fourteen holidaymakers to Manchester Airport crashed on the M56, half-way through it's three-mile journey. As many people died at the train crash at Southall, and three less than the crash at Hatfield that all but brought Britain's railways to a complete standstill.

Those rail crashes were all over the news for weeks. Yesterday's M56 accident wasn't even the lead item on Channel 4 news. All of which highlights the totally different attitudes towards accidents between the two modes of transport.

On Transport Blog, Brian Micklethwaite writes this rather silly post.

The big difference between road safety and train safety is that road safety is in your hands. If you drive carefully you can pretty much guarantee not to get killed in your car, or to kill anyone else.

That may be a popular opinion, especially by those people who think they're immortal, and don't drive safely. But it's completely false. It's the comfortable lie motorists tell themselves because the truth, that they are responsible not just for their own safety, but for safety of every else sharing the same road as themselves, and vice versa, is too much for them to handle.

He goes on to describe his father, who sounds like a very safe and careful driver, who insisted that a properly aware driver will never always be able to avoid any accident, even he meets some idiot driving on the wrong side the road on a blind bend at twice the safe speed limit.

Millions agree with my dad that all deaths on the roads are the fault of the drivers involved, all of the drivers involved. If any one of the drivers involved had been driving like my dad did instead of how they actually did, there'd have been fewer deaths and maybe none at all. It's tough on passengers who die on the roads. But they could have created a culture of safety instead of nagging dad to go faster, so they too deserved to die, if they did.

Take the argument in the final sentence to it's logical conclusion, then anyone killed at Southall, Ladbrooke Grove and Hatfield that voted Conservative in the 1992 general election deserved to die as well, for they voted in the government that fragmented the railway and compromised safety.

Road deaths? They're up to us. This is what everyone thinks, and everyone is right.

Millions of people might believe that. But millions of people believe in horoscopes. Millions of people think the most pressing question in Britain is who's going to be the next person kicked out of Big Brother. Millions believe everything they read in the Daily Mirror. But that doesn't make them correct.