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Comment by salynchnew | Hacker News Reader

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Please don't post like this on HN. This kind of comment is a generic tangent (and a rather ghoulish one), that can be made about any tragedy; yes, no matter how bad something is, there's always something worse. It's the fact that this is an unusual occurrence that makes it noteworthy. The guidelines ask us to converse curiously and avoid generic tangents and shallow dismissals. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FWIW: a single car crash killing 21 people would still be newsworthy in America. And I think if you math it out with something per capita equivalent, this would actually be an exceptionally bad day/incident for the US.

But of course you're not wrong, trains are vastly safer than private cars. If anyone uses this as evidence against having a proper rail system, they're ignorant.

But - until someone does that, there's no reason to make this about the US or cars vs. trains. It's borderline offensive to reflexively politicize this before anyone else had; it almost feels like you're intentionally trying to sow conflict, here.

~107 people die per day from car accidents in the USA [0].

0. Per 2024 stats from the NHTSA (https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-estimates-39345-t...)

Right, so, mathing it out, the US has a population of around 340 million but Spain has a population of around 49 million. 340/49 is roughly 7, so the per capita equivalent in the US would be a single incident killing 21*7=147 people. So that'd be one incident killing 1.5x the average number of people usually killed across the rest of the country combined.

Like I said, a pretty bad day.

A completely unremarkable day, more like it. Given stochasticity there's bound to be at least a dozen days per year with 50% more than the average, especially since car deaths depend a lot on weekday, holidays, weather and so on - much moreso than train deaths. No one would look up from it, wouldn't make the news.

You're assuming it was the only incident in America that day, rather than an exceptional outlier stacked on top of the usual day in America.

Yes, a single car crash killing 150 people would make the news. It would be among the worst, if not the single worst, car accident of all time [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-vehicle_collision

> And I think if you math it out with something per capita equivalent, this would actually be an exceptionally bad day/incident for the US.

This is now how I interpreted "bad day", think it would be clearer to remove "day" if that's what you meant. Of course you're right in that it would be awful as a car accident, they simply don't happen that many as a time. Which is why our monkey brain's lack of emotional response to "many small cuts" vs "one big cut" incorrectly causes the belief that cars and e.g. coal/gas are much safer than they are.

> "many small cuts" vs "one big cut" incorrectly causes the belief that cars and e.g. coal/gas are much safer than they are

Did anyone say that? This conversation was mostly about newsworthiness.

https://international-railway-safety-council.com/safety-stat...

In Europe, trains are 28 times safer than cars (fatalities per passenger-km).

I was born in the mid-late 80's, and I remember the 90's being an era where everyone knew in the remotest tiny village about youngsters dying in-road (usually because of being drunk). Dark ages.

You would find car related fatalities for granted every Summer in the news.

The discourse here is more of a criticism of Puentes, who is a very controversial minister overseeing this.

Unusual for a train though.

We already know Americans can't drive but with trains like... how do you mess up a straight line?

> how do you mess up a straight line?

One thing I learned working on a system that did train positioning for the 7 Line subway in NYC is that train systems are a lot more complicated than just straight lines. They are complicated networks with custom signaling and the trains don't necessarily travel on the usual side in the usual direction at all times.

That said, in this particular case it basically was just two straight lines side by side and one of the trains derailed and travelled into the path of the other track.

Trains don't often derail on straight sections, likely either someone fucked up really bad on rail maintenance or someone sabotaged the rail.

> For the last decade, an average of 1,300 trains derailed each year (in the US), accounting for 61% of all train accidents.

https://usafacts.org/articles/are-train-derailments-becoming...

> In 2024, there were 1,507 significant railway accidents in the EU, with a total of 750 people killed and 548 seriously injured.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derailment

I'm half-convinced our good friends the magic robots are totally defeating peoples' ability to read.

> In 2024, there were 1,507 significant railway accidents in the EU, with a total of 750 people killed and 548 seriously injured.

See the graph titled "Rail accidents by type of accident". There were 63 derailments in 2024; most of the accidents were non-fatal accidents of this type: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

The bulk of those are accidents involving railway crossings. There is a program to get rid of all level crossings in NL but it will take a lot of time and cost a ton of money. But there really is no way in which you can make a level crossing safe in combination with normal train speeds.

American trains are largely freight travelling long rural distances. You didn't mention it, so I presume because you didn't take it into account, so your statistics sound to me like they don't mean anything comparable.

Derailments are common is what the stats show. US derailments are largely property damage as they are freight centric, while in Europe, passenger deaths are higher due to more heavy passenger utilization. Derailment is hard to defend against.

No, they are not common. The numbers you've been given are completely wrong.

The GGP has quoted the derailments figure from the USA page, but the total accidents (including trespassers and level crossing accidents) for the EU.

The EU page they cite says there were 63 derailments in 2024.

A derailment in Europe tends to make the news even when there are no injuries.

This single accident has killed more train passengers in Spain than were killed in the whole EU in 2024 (16).

They're not?

Commuter train crashes into crane in Murcia, marking Spain's fourth train crash in five days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46725317 - January 2026

...when they come off the tracks.

a high-speed train travelling from Malaga to Madrid derailed and crossed over onto another track

Yes we know it derailed, that's not the answer to *how* it failed on a straight line.

How in the cause and effect sense, not which direction it went.

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