Nassim Taleb, in his 2007 book "The Black Swan" on the fragility of our assumptions about risks, proposes a thought experiment called "the silent hero." In this thought experiment we imagine a legislator who manages to enact a law that goes into universal effect on Sept. 10, 2001, imposing continuously locked bulletproof doors in every commercial airplane cockpit. This law is not a popular measure among the airlines, as it elevates costs and inconveniences the lives of the airline personnel.
This legislator who imposed locks on cockpit doors (thereby preventing the horrific deaths of Sept. 11, 2001) gets no statues in public squares, not so much as a quick mention of his contribution in his obituary. Seeing how superfluous his measure was, and how it squandered resources, the public, with great help from the airlines, might well kick him out of office. He will die with the impression of having done nothing useful.
These "silent heroes," who unknowingly save lives with preventative measures, go unnoticed.
In Fort Collins, City Manager Darin Atteberry has facilitated the crusade to waive the requirement of trains to sound their horns as they pass through over a mile of Old Town. In so doing, he endeavors to repeal an existing "silent hero" measure from 2005 meant to prevent the loss of life.
A ban on train horns in Florida in the early '90s led to a doubling in accidents during the duration of the ban, according to a Federal Railroad Administration report, and I couldn't help but ask myself when I heard about Atteberry's proposed quiet zone for trains: When the first preventable train-related fatality happens in Old Town, will he and those who helped pass this measure experience guilt? Unlike in the cockpit door example, we will know precisely who could have prevented this accident.
My wife and I live in the Mason Street Flats downtown, directly next to the train tracks. We can personally attest that the train noise is at times deafening. However, we consider this clamor a small price to pay to avoid a preventable death: a kid on a bike, a green teen in a stickshift, an unfamiliar tourist.
Atteberry claims that sufficient research has been done to ensure that a fatal train accident in Old Town will only happen once every 500 years. Are we willing to go all-in on these formulated odds? However well-intentioned these blind statistics may be, the fact of the matter is that Fort Collins is a dynamic and rapidly growing city with increasingly more pedestrians and traffic in the downtown corridor and along the train tracks. A crash or fatality, especially with this added growth, cannot simply be predicted like the outcome of a series of coin tosses.
To repeal the effective preventative measure of train horns sounding through Old Town Fort Collins, while ostensibly popular, would be downright foolish and undoubtedly more risk-prone — all for the silly sake of assuaging our ears.
We strongly urge you to be a silent hero by voicing your opposition to this proposed train horn waiver, which is still under review, to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) at Regulations.gov.
"once every 500 years" seems like great odds to me! However, I lived 3 blocks from the train, and a month after moving there I never even noticed when the train was going through town. So I'm all for letting them sound the horn.
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame that they can't compromise by just installing a second horn in the trains for this situation. I bet people wouldn't mind so much if the volume was reduced so you could still have a conversation a block away from a passing train. I'm sure there's a good reason they can't go this route though.