Is Amtrak Crash Nevada’s Fault? - Trains Magazine

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You guys are obviously more informed on the accident than I, but I'd like to jump in here.

Bucyrus

 Just because people can see the signals from half a mile away, is it reasonable to expect that everyone will and must see the signals at that point?  A driver’s attention cannot possibly be everywhere, so the argument that no accidents would occur if drivers paid attention is a faulty argument.  Even the most perfect driver is always not paying attention to some portion of his or her sphere of attention.  Generally on a road, a driver’s attention span will either be focused on the far or the near portion of the road ahead.  Generally, a driver has to focus on the road near and far just to stay on it.  A driver might have various reasons for focusing near or far, and might change from one to the other at times.

 

Everybody knows that looking far will help identify obstructions and give the most time to react to them.  But, out in the middle of nowhere, a driver might grow complacent about the possibility of obstructions.  A grade crossing that has seldom or never been active in a driver’s memory of experience of that crossing might not even register as something to be looking far ahead for.

 

Therefore, I conclude that a driver’s attention lapse on the far road ahead, for say a half-minute (3080 feet at 70mph), might be a completely functional and legal part of driving out there. 

Nah, I disagree with the time-limit. I can tell you as a driver that if I'm checking a blind spot, I'm not looking forward. But that's not a half-minute. Nor is adjusting the radio, or grabbing a drink. Heck, I've got just about all those memorized I can do it without looking out the side of my vision, a professional driver should be able to do that in his sleep. Even if he were focusing on the nearpoint fo the road, driver training should have caught the notice of the yellow rXr sign to his right and said "Hey, there's a train track, I cshould keep an eye on that." Most of the truckers I know slow down at the sight of that sign alone (even a drop of 5mph) to check and see if they'll need to do somethign further, even if they aren't with a firm who stops at all crossings.

Velocitation, or street-hypnosis, even in itss most simplified form I could see. going to snip out a section there.

 That being said, even my local museum faces the same things. When we run trains for the State Fair, and have been doing so since '86, we send a work crew through there to hang ""Caution, increased train traffic" signs. A private charter tiptoes along to inspect every crossing and grind down the rust (since we don't use those rails outside fo the fair) and we usually have radio ads and traffic reports along the lines of "There is a train for the next two weeks, so be careful." So in and of itself, the seldom firign crossing is a valid point.

 

 

Bucyrus

Apparently during the first part of the Amtrak 25-second warning, this driver did not focus on either the signals flashing, or the train entering from one side of his sphere of attention.  During the driver’s approach, both the signal and the presence of the train would have grown in their visual obviousness.  Now there may be extenuating circumstances beyond just the normal application of driving attention out there, but for some reason, this driver apparently lost about 18 seconds of that 25-second warning.  That left 7 seconds to realize the emergency, hit the brakes, skid 300 feet, and hit the train.

 

So the question is this:

 

Why did driver lose those 18 seconds of the Amtrak warning?  Can it be just attributable to the normal application of driver attention out in the wide-open west?  The suggestion of cell phone, texting, or similar communication as being possible driver distraction is highly applicable here.  That may indeed be the next shoe to drop.  Traveling in a convoy can engender competition and boldness, and expressing this kind of bravado could also be distracting.  However, there may have been none of this type of activity distraction.  I could see it being just due to an 18-second lapse of focus on the far road.  There are only 25 seconds to work with. 

correct me, but wasn't this a convoy of other trucks from the same firm, going the same place? I can't see there being a bonus to be the first one in, over the third one. Maybe it would get him one more load for the day, but I don't really believe that. 

So then, wehere were the other drivers during this? Did we just not have a good samaritan in the secodn truck? Thjey obviously saw the warnings, so surely they would've noticed the lack of brake lights, if not the fact that his truck was not slowing down. Where was the wake-up call over the radio, or was that what got him the seven seconds it did?   

 

Bucyrus

Because the warning begins with an indication of signals that are 3000 feet ahead of the driver, it seems quite reasonable and understandable that even the best of drivers might miss some of that warning as it begins, and not see the warning until they get a little closer.  So if you shave off say 10 seconds for that delayed perception, you only have 15 seconds left.  Then it takes 7 more seconds to stop, and that is a panic stop.  How long would a non-panic stop take?  Lets say a normal stop takes 12 seconds.

 

That leaves a 3-second margin of safety.  Is that a reasonable safety margin, considering the potential loss of life if a driver happens to need 4 seconds instead of 3 seconds?  If that truck were a gasoline tanker, it could have killed half the people on the train.    

I think most driving stanrds will tell you "no", based on the fact that common practice at that speed is to leave a large3r margin of safety just for following someone. I think it's supposed to be 5 at 70mph. That being said, that margin of safety is completely detached from the driver's actual reaction time. If he had a 5second cushion, but only reacted in the last 5 seconds instead of the last 7, it would've done him no good, and nothing short of a PTC system that related semis to crossing signals would have mattered.

Going into the argument on theprevious page about speedlimits, while there is a limit to how much "handholding" the government should be doing, can we really be going about saying "Oh, well, you were speeding, so we won't do anyting for you or the other hundred or however many people do it? That sounds to me as almost being as unsafe as someone doing the speed-limit when everyone else is trying to fly around him. There's a point in when the police are clocking people, where it's as dangerous to try and disrupt eh flow of traffic with two or three slow obstacles in the river.

So yes, if that stretch of highway is moving faster than the speed-limit routinely, then one of two things needs to be done. It either needs to be more thouroghly enforced, or be made as safe as people seem to think it is. Step one, is giving more attention to stopping distances.