Nvidia marketing manager killed during train rescue attempt
polygon.com
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Railroad crews that hit people and/or vehicles can get extremely bad PTSD and it can have a massive impact on them. My best wishes go to the crewmember who is likely dealing with a very trying time.
I'm not sure if that is true, but it really ingrained in me a sense of how horrible it must be to be so powerless in that sort of situation.
It's possibly even worse being the driver, but it always struck me what an utterly horrific job that must be and wondering what stress-related illnesses it would produce in the affected employees.
edit: I should clarify that any large body parts are collected by the police or medical personnel. The engineer's job is to certify the integrity of the track and clear it of foreign matter, washing it down too if necessary.
It's a very tough situation, because trains don't stop on demand. Last week, a friend-of-a-friend killed himself by walking into a slow-driving train. Imagine being the driver of a train with a 20-year-old kid walking towards your cabin and being unable to stop the train in time.
Things might be bad for the Caltrain engineer, but he still has his job. However, for Mr Failed Suicide, he has the following to look forward to: the problems that existed before the attempt, those will not have gone away. The physical agony of injury due to being hit by a train. A hospital bill. The fact that he is not going to be Mr Popular for indirectly causing someone else to die. Hence, with hindsight, his original depression will look like happy times.
In London (and probably every major city) commuters are regularly affected by those trying to commit suicide by being hit by a train. Recently we had one woman on the tracks first thing in the morning. She did get hit, but not fatally. This required a suspension of service. Eventually the authorities caught her and, after being admitted to 'A+E' (Accident and Emergency), they took her to the mental health ward. After lunch she was able to discharge herself and make it down to the train station where she was able to do the deed just in time for rush hour.
Because the trains ended up out of sequence due to her morning capers and because the tracks had to be handed over to the police for them to do their work for afternoon/evening, it meant that she had managed to effectively close the track for the entire day. You can imagine how best pleased the tens of thousands of commuters on that line were.
I would not be the least bit surprised if the guy that tried to suicide himself in this story tries to kill himself as soon as he is able to, as per aforementioned London lady. There is a big difference between 'cry for help' suicide attempts and being on the tracks. There is also a difference between someone standing on a tall building preparing to jump and someone on the tracks. Effectively, with that train coming along it is equivalent to the jumper being in freefall, the point of no return has been passed. I don't think that our hero in this story had time to realise that.
[1]: 12 a year on average apparently: http://kalw.org/post/caltrain-engineer-talks-about-coping-tr...
Makes it impossible to fall or jump on the tracks.
http://www.caltrain.com/stations/systemmap.html
This isn't a subway, where the entry points are clearly defined. Look at this station, for example
The tracks keep going, with basically nothing protecting them. Putting up walls around the entire thing would be a significant undertaking.
It isn't that you can't enclose a long platform - more that it is both costly and requires raised platforms with grade separation.
Caltrain stations are not designed to restrict platform access to ticketed passengers and anyone can just walk to the end of the platform and go around. Subways and many raised-platform stations on high-density lines are designed to restrict platform access in such a way that it is difficult to get around and hop on the tracks.
Of course, not much will stop a very determined person - it is more designed to stop accidents.
If someone gets trapped between the doors, then the train should be disabled from moving. You see it most often - people dashing in at the last moment getting themselves or their backpack getting stuck. The station doors also have to synchronize with the train doors. Else say, the train door opens, you step out but the station door does not open. Now the train is ready to move...
- The train doors need to line up closely with the glass doors, for obvious reasons. Commuter trains in the US are not capable of stopping so precisely. Usually the trains would have to support some kind of computerized stop-assist in order to be precise enough to pull this off.
- Said stop-assist wouldn't just be a train feature, it would involve communication with the track, and therefore upgrades to the entire signaling system. Many systems have this "for free" by virtue of being built later. The actual track Caltrain runs on pre-dates Caltrain itself by a wide margin.
- You need to run a unified, homogeneous vehicle fleet so the doors are in the same places on all trains. This is the problem with safety doors in large legacy train systems (see: NYC, Chicago) where due to legacy factors there are many vastly different trains all running on the same track.
A lot of non-trivial problems where the only solution is vast capital spending.
For some greater detail: AAR regulations require that trains that run on lines which include freight traffic meet certain weight and crash standards. US freight cars have the highest standard axle loads in the world, so any train that runs where it can hit one must be able to withstand a head-on collision. The sole exception to the rule is when all freight traffic runs at a particular time when no passenger trains are running, with derails (a safeguard) in place to keep any freight from making it on to the tracks outside the window.
Caltrain runs on the old Southern Pacific line, which includes several on-line customers and a few branch lines. Due to the way the line is made, there is no way to have the required separation without significant upgrades.
Finally, stop-assist is now doable via GPS signals and other lineside equipment, removing the need for signalling upgrades. However, it also requires either lighter equipment or disc brakes on all cars along with equipment in the cab. Both are quite costly, and always require a homogenous fleet with the exact same door configuration.
This is very cool. Thanks for the TIL!
However I believe there is at least another solution doable for commuter trains in the us. It is not that hard and not that expensive to have a sliding panel who opens in front of the doors.
But what probably matters here is that cost of a dead human < cost of new system to protect human lives. So as long as this is the case they won't change it.
If they're suicides then there's no point spending a lot of money trying to prevent them, at least not at such a late stage.
It's not as hard as you make it out to be. I live in Japan where these (very effective) safety doors have been rolling out for more than a decade.
I don't think there is any need for computerized stop-assist. On at least some of the trains here, and I think most, it is up to the driver top stop the train. Once in a great while, they accidentally overshoot by a foot or two, apologize on the loudspeaker, and back the train up to align it properly.
There is not need for a homogeneous vehicle fleet, either. In fact, in Japan just about every line gets a unique train design (which does seem weirdly inefficient, but whatever). At first they we in fact designing different safety doors to match every train. But later, to cut costs and make it possible to have safety gates at stations featuring trains with different door configurations stop, they just designed wider safety gate that can open more on one side than the other.
This brings to mind another simple optimization -- if your trains really suck so much ass that the driver is unable to stop them with reasonable precision, just make the safety gates six feet (or ten feet, whatever) wider than the train doors. (Easier if you make them lift up to open rather than opening laterally.) There is no need for the safety doors to be the same width as the train doors.
They also don't have to be expensive and made of glass. A cheaper gate consisting of a few strong bars is nearly impossible for a human to accidentally fall through.
Finally, it doesn't have to be a track feature. Some of the ones here are essentially the same as an American style garage door opener. When the operator/conductor opens the train doors, he then opens the safety gates.
Japan has one of the largest passenger rail industries with massive capital investment. They are quite good at station design and engineering and I definitely applaud their use of enclosed platforms - which ironically came about more out of a desire to reduce wasted energy on air-conditioned subway stations ventilating into the tunnels.
> I don't think there is any need for computerized stop-assist. On at least some of the trains here, and I think most, it is up to the driver top stop the train. Once in a great while, they accidentally overshoot by a foot or two, apologize on the loudspeaker, and back the train up to align it properly.
Lighter trains can do so manually, but on the majority of lines in the JR network commuter trains and shinkansen have a computerized stop-assist that will get the train within a few inches of the desired point. Some lines do not use the computerized stop-assist (Yamanote, Chuo, etc.) as they are primarily above ground with longer platforms.
> There is not need for a homogeneous vehicle fleet, either. In fact, in Japan just about every line gets a unique train design (which does seem weirdly inefficient, but whatever). At first they we in fact designing different safety doors to match every train. But later, to cut costs and make it possible to have safety gates at stations featuring trains with different door configurations stop, they just designed wider safety gate that can open more on one side than the other.
In Japan, the majority of trains use very similar door configurations. They either have end-cap doors, or 2-4 doors with even distribution. Most commuter lines with the enclosed platforms employ a single type of rolling stock on a dedicated platform.
The Keisei railway and other private roads have platform gates, which are a bit different. Those are waist height and are simply to keep people from stepping to the edge when express trains pass. I think you are referring to these, and they are definitely useful, but see my final point as to why they aren't feasible for Caltrain.
> This brings to mind another simple optimization -- if your trains really suck so much ass that the driver is unable to stop them with reasonable precision, just make the safety gates six feet (or ten feet, whatever) wider than the train doors. (Easier if you make them lift up to open rather than opening laterally.) There is no need for the safety doors to be the same width as the train doors.
They don't suck ass, they are just quite heavy. A Caltrain rolling stock set is 160 tons for the locomotive and then 20 tons per car (est.) That is far, far heavier than any JR trainset in operation and much harder to stop. You don't get electro-pneumatic brakes to stop every car at exactly the same rate - instead you have dynamic brakes and air. Try to stop that with some precision :P
In the end, the main sticking point isn't the rolling stock anyway. The problem is that the platforms are open and anyone can walk on at anytime. There is no way in current Caltrain stations to restrict access with any degree of certainty. To change this would require grade separation and massive overhauls of each station at the very least.
Japanese trains exclusively use raised platforms and 99%+ of stations have restricted access (with only rural/flag stops being the exception). This makes it easy to use some sort of safety mechanism to restrict access to the tracks. Trains in the US are far different and don't really fit the same mold, unless you get to the Northeast and ride the NYC commuter trains (MTA, LIRR, ConnDot, etc.)
I have always felt enclosed platforms are necessary to move passenger rail forward in the US, but they are a long ways off - and likely will never happen regardless.
If we got fair value for infrastructure projects, I'd like to see a huge amount more transportation, energy, etc. infrastructure in the US -- a lot of what we have is outdated or insufficient. I don't really care if it is government or private industry, but that it costs vastly more to get the same work done in the US than in other places contributes to substandard infrastructure.
1. Accept the sensible, well-costed proposal for 3-years of intensive works.
2. Announce you're going to cut costs the next year in the budget by reducing the scope.
3. The project is now overbudget, because the cost per unit delivered has gone up since hey, plant and tooling is a big fixed cost.
The blame for this lies on the taxpayer, who keeps voting in the idiots who do this or make promises along these lines.
- Frank: People keep killing themselves.
- Larry: Put up a wall.
- Frank: Nah, too expensive.
What do you really think of Frank and Larry in this sitch? Be honest.
Now, how is that different from what y'all were saying...?
Cognitive dissonance reaches for the -1. Had you paid slightly more attention to your discomfort, you could have learned something about yourselves.
By the way, I think Larry is a genius and a comedian in your situation because what the fuck else can you say to a blanket statement like "People keep killing themselves"?
HN will mature as a platform for discourse when it becomes less of a concentrator of one particular worldview and more of a reactor of many.
- Larry: Put up a wall.
- Frank: Nah, they'll just jump off it
FTFY
A story. Up here in Vancouver, the police recently released a study showing that the thing we did in the nineties -- ending welfare and closing institutions for the severely mentally ill -- actually cost us vastly more, because the police ended up doubling as nurses/counsellors/social workers, and the additional training cost vastly more than the original division of labour.
What is the annual cost of leaving the hurt hanging?
It seems that you have extrapolated both these things from the fact that someone has proposed a technical solution to suicide, which is completely illogical. There is strong evidence that removing popular, easy methods of suicide actually reduce suicide rates.
However, there are some above ground sections, and I think the stations there don't have walls. It's been ten years since I've been there, so things might have changed...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_on_the_Mass_Rapid_Transi...
In the case of this particular "101", that point is not yet met. However, when the cost of 6.4 miles of single-lane is $72 million, it does get a bit pricey. [1]
They are planning to add another TOLL/HOV lane for most of the corridor, and open up the existing HOV to TOLL. You might get to drive it in 2018! But I don't see cost estimates for that one yet. [2]
[1] - http://www.vta.org/projects-and-programs/highway/us-101-auxi...
[2] - http://www.vta.org/projects-and-programs/highway/us-101-expr...
/joking, obviously
(Yes, this must be costly, but it's not just relevant to prevent suicides. I have once been at the very brink of a subway platform in Paris without that did not have such equipment, along with a huge crowd of other people who were eager to get in the train. Anyone behind could just push anybody on the (electrified) tracks, and if panic were to break out for any reason it would have been a disaster.)
Low tech, but would offer a way to help people without risking your own life.
You'd need surveillance or something to prevent people from using it as a prank though.
Putting someone else's well-being above your own life is the mark of a true human. I hope if I was in that position, I'd have tried to help too.
I think that it’s important to try to help other people, but your safety is also important. For example it’s common that to rescue one person is drowning, more than one person attempts a rescue and all of then get drowned. You must learn how to proceed in those cases to be helpfull.
A few years ago I did a first aid mini-course. It was mostly about CPR and how to act in case of fire and chemical splits. The guide emphasized that the security of the rescuers is important. For example that before entering a door, you must check that the door will not close and trap you inside the dangerous place. Or make sure that the place you enter don’t have toxic fumes.
I can’t find a direct cite of this. But if you go to http://www.redcross.org/prepare/disaster/chemical-emergency , press the “respond during” tab you get this recommendation (near the middle of the page):
> If you find someone who appears to have been injured from chemical exposure, make sure you are not in danger before administering First Aid.
e.g. fire and person inside some room is really far away, lots of smoke, cannot see, heat, etc? Close the door, you cannot help and you'll very likely die.
As said: This is taught during first aid and first responder courses.
Original article in the Merc: http://www.mercurynews.com/twitter/ci_24989424/tech-worker-k....
(And yes, I understand the irony of this comment!)
And if you want a more complex model and don’t mind using made up numbers, I’d prefer to weight myself and my family members with 2 points, and give my daughter at least 5 points.
Condolences to both families.
To mindlessly kill yourself for any person is pointless, especially if that person is already suicidal. The burden of knowing someone died to save you is not something depressed people cope with well.
Of course, I don't think anyone here, parent included, would be so tactless as to bring this up with anyone closely connected to the situation during their time of loss, but I don't think it's good to shy away from asking difficult moral questions.
e.g. if I'm alone and unarmed, and I see someone stopped involuntarily by the side of the road and relatively safe, in a bad area, in a normal-to-sketchy car, etc., I will probably call the police to report it, rather than stopping myself. If I see an elderly person in a rich area in a non-threatening car with a flat tire, I'll possibly stop and offer to help, or at least put better flares or whatever behind his car and make sure he's ok for water/health while waiting. If I see an actual accident in realtime, or the aftermath of an obvious accident, with likely trauma to passengers, I'll almost always stop (unless police/paramedics are already there).
Similarly, if someone was standing on the tracks with an approaching train, I'd verbally command him how to GTFO, and possibly belt/bag-as-rope, but particularly if it were an adult stranger who is potentially suicidal or otherwise unlikely to cooperate, I'd be instinctively reluctant to get in front of the train myself. Someone who accidentally fell would scare me less, but would also be more likely to be able to get out on his own or with assistance from the platform.
But the time to make all these decisions is well in advance of the incident; what level of comfort you have with different kinds of threats, skills in dealing with things, etc. I'd probably be more comfortable with water rescues (since I actually trained for this as a dive master) than most people, but less comfortable dealing with crazy/mentally unstable people, and more comfortable with end-a-hostile-threat vs. prevent-self-harm.
I've accepted what I thought at the time was a relatively low risk to myself to extricate someone, and it later turned out to have been vastly more dangerous than I'd thought originally. I made a quick assessment of the risks and my capabilities, was wrong, and got lucky. (I generally weight my own survival disproportionately highly vs. that of others, too, so I don't think I'm really reckless.)
I judge people much more harshly for situations where they have a long time to reflect and choose not to.
In this case, he probably either thought the train was slowing/stopping, and thus he'd have more time, or that he could extricate the person more quickly than he did. It might be the case that what he did had a high expected chance of success and he was just unlucky, or he had wrong information in the instants before, or overestimated his abilities, or underestimated the difficulty, or just had bad judgement; we probably won't know.
How is this any different?
It's entirely possible that he made an error in judgment, and made the whole situation worse because there are two people wounded (well, one dead, one wounded), while despite any attempt he made, there would have been at least one.
I wouldn't want someone to try to save me if I were going to die either way, and they were going to die if they tried.
And it's entirely possible that his decision was reasonable. Currently the facts presented are wholly insufficient to draw either conclusion. So one must ask why the presumption is that the judgement was obviously flawed, and what one's motivation is for commenting on such an unclear matter in such a way that effectively implies that the deceased is an idiot.
One aspect of this is that people vastly overestimate how foreseeable an outcome is. If B occurs as a result of A, we tend to assume that B was an entirely foreseeable consequence of A, and that the person who did A either knew this or was an idiot for not knowing it.
Key difference is that this probably wasn't something he was _taught_. He was acting purely in the moment.
I think was you take that first step you tend to throw out risk assessment. Once you've looked someone in the eye, made whatever thread of personal connection, to then walk away and choose to let them die is possibly worse than death to some.
I'm aware that we don't know nearly enough details here to judge what he should have done; I was responding to the emotive response that we should laud every attempt to help someone in danger.
> not everyone would want a stranger to try and help them in every situation
This isn't relevant to the ethics of the situation. When the desires of the man on the tracks can't be ascertained, his life should by default be considered worth saving, as a fellow human being.
> sometimes not helping a stranger in mortal danger really is the ethical choice.
I have no idea what the "sometimes" are to which you're referring. Barstool philosophers are prone to saying that "sometimes things are other things," which is awfully hard to refute since probability of all events is finite in some universe.
I don't think it was a selfish action, and I do think the guy on the track was worth saving. But all the same, what we do know is that two people died because one person tried to save him, when doing nothing would've only had one die.
We don't have enough information to know if it was reasonable to try and save him or not, or the ability of the guy to know those facts at the time - the information is too sparse.
I was just pointing out that it's quite possible that it was inevitable that the guy on the tracks was going to die, and the guy trying to save him simply made it worse.
There are also numerous stories of drowning victims drowning their would-be saviors.
I don't think any and every attempt to save someone should be lauded as something good, and think those times we can ascertain that there's a good chance both people will die (versus the chance both will live), we should simply leave the victim to die, painful as it is to sit there impotently watching it happen.
Doing otherwise gives is a net negative expectation of the number of people alive, and I can't say that's an ethical choice.
I think people (including you) are very emotional about these kinds of situations, and aren't approaching them from a "try to maximize the number of people who live" perspective.
If my wife were in the same situation, I sure hope she'd consider the effect on me and our children if she were hit by a train before entering such a dangerous situation without any understanding of the overall circumstance
Everybody can't and shouldn't always be a superhero.
It's a question of which duty takes priority. I like to think that I'd take some risks to save someone else. I've never had occasion to put it to the test, but it certainly was pounded into me in the military in my younger days.
In civilian life, I'm not going to knowingly put myself anywhere near grave danger on behalf of an adult stranger (the calculus might be different for a child). Granted, there's always the possibility of misjudgment in the heat of the moment, as other commenters have pointed out. Even so, I'm going to err on the side of caution -- because as between an adult stranger and my family, there's absolutely no question in my mind where my higher duty lies.
Take all of your fears, drives, and insecurities, add your unreliable risk-assessing abilities (common to most humans) and an amount of adrenaline that many of us will never experience, and cram them into the space of seconds in the face of certain death, in front of an audience. I simply don't see the use of second-guessing a decision made under those circumstances.
For example, it could well be that someone "freezes" in motion, unable to discontinue the effort, compelled by adrenaline and emotion and whatever else. I've experienced this myself in far less serious situations.
Or it could be Mr. Scholz was in complete control of his faculties, and made a ordered, rational decision to keep up the effort at all costs. We'll never know.
It's fun to think about what I might do, but I have no way to relate to the actions of someone else. It's just too complicated.
That's why you have to try to war-game these things in advance -- because in the heat of the moment you won't have time or capability to analyze them rationally. (It's the same reason why athletes and soldiers and sailors train incessantly, so that they can rely largely on trained pattern recognition, a.k.a. reflex.)
----
> It's fun to think about what I might do, but I have no way to relate to the actions of someone else. It's just too complicated.
Um, OK.
This man acted bravely by trying to save this stranger, this fellow human being. Since no one else stepped up to help (or did I miss the part in the article where it talked about everyone trying to lend a helping hand?) he took it upon himself to do the decent HUMAN thing and try to help.
It's easy to criticize and pick apart this man's actions and judgement from behind your keyboard and after the fact. This man did a brave thing that had bad consequences. Yes it's a sad loss for this family, but this man is a hero in my book. He died trying to help people, regardless of whether he knew them or not.
Out of curiosity, are you married? Do you have kids, or aging parents, or anyone else to whom you feel any sense of long-term duty? I'm not trying to be snarky, just to assess where you're coming from.
The only reason I speculate that might be the case was when I was held at gunpoint (long story), my mind immediately switched to a "detached observer" point of view. No fear or heroism, just observation of events.
Chemists know all about it because of the risk of poisonous gas. If I saw someone collapsed in front of their fume hood not knowing what was going on I wouldn't even try to pull the fellow out without breathing gear, even if it was a friend or colleague. This is left to trained personnel, that is the fire brigade.
There was this incident about twenty years ago at my old university where they dispensed liquid nitrogen in a basement that had no oxygen sensor (!). The ventilation had failed, and a student who came to fill up his dewar fell unconcious for lack of oxygen and couldn't turn off the tap. A second student tried to pull him out and became unconscious as well. It took number three to pull out numbers 1 and 2. Result: one dead, one disabled.
There is bravery, and there is insane heroics. Pulling a fellow bent on suicide off a train track is the second kind. It takes discipline not to do it.
I wonder if I ever find myself on the platform hearing screams for help coming from down in the tracks... is it reasonable advice to just scream back at the person to lie down between the tracks -- what's the clearance?
Apparently sometimes enough, but not always, says Gawker/Reddit. [1] The 'best advice' is run like hell to the far end of the platform, and there should be a ladder there.
[1] - http://gawker.com/5965694/what-to-do-if-you-fall-onto-the-su...