03-13-2023, 03:51 PM
(03-13-2023, 09:59 AM)neonjoe Wrote: The Toronto subway claims many lives a year as well and its grade separated. We don't know the circumstances for this specific case but walking in a fenced area of the system in the middle of the night could have been due to many different reasons.
With the TO case, platform screen doors could help but really there's a point of declining returns for the investment made. Where there's a will to trespass there will always be a way.
There's quite a difference though. TTC subway fatalities are quite often suicides, accidental falls and the occasional psychotic person pushing someone onto the tracks (though that is extremely rare). And when it comes to subways, they're grade separated indeed but the stations are totally open. Thankfully, as you said, screen doors can be helpful. Unfortunately cost is once again the issue. It is estimated to cost well over 1 billion dollars to install screen doors on TTC subway stations, although that figure seems extremely bloated for such a simple technology.
The issue is: what price do we put on a human life? This forum will whine for weeks when a cyclist is killed and cry to the wolves that we should be lowering speed limits, putting crossing islands in, adding in new lights or speed bumps and so on and so on. All of that costs money, either in the construction of the infrastructure or the economic losses incurred by making it harder for people to get places in a timely manner. We want safe cycling lanes and sidewalks, so why not safe transit? I don't have any children but if I did, I would gladly put any sum value on their life...whether that was to improve bike lanes or rapid transit.
Unfortunately it is already too late to really do anything about this since we were too cheap to build the LRT in a safe manner in the first place. They got this thing approved as fast as they could and cut sooooooooo many corners to save money on it. Safety was not a priority. Any safety boils down to a horn, some signs and lights and essentially saying to anyone "it's your duty to not get your car hit or your life taken". Which, yes, it is our personal responsibility to ensure that but we also have to ensure we also mitigate as many avenues for those incidents from occurring in the first place.
Accidents will always happen, but we should be trying everything we can to design and engineer a world in which they are harder to happen. It's a very simple concept, money be damned. If money is an issue then to hell with bike lanes and pedestrian islands, right?