[PRCo] Re: (no subject)

[Schneider Fred]

Perhaps some of you are old enough to remember the accident in  
Chicago in 1949 or 1950 when a gasoline truck plowed into Chicago PCC  
car 7078.   Eight thousand gallons of fuel went up in smoke gutting a  
number of adjacent buildings.   Life magazine had some fabulous  
pictures of the incinerated remains of humans jammed against the  
inside of the
inward folding blinker doors at the rear of the car.    That is if  
such can be fabulous.

Well that resulted in some cities having cars with outward folding  
doors.   A good example would be the 25 PCCs delivered to San  
Francisco in 1952.

Did Pittsburgh and Philadelphia rush out and change all their cars  
with blinker doors or inward folding front doors to outward folding  
doors?   Certainly not because operators had to be able to open them  
on very narrow streets to see if they had enough room to inch by  
parked cars.

All designs are a compromise.  In this case door designs are a  
compromise.

Sometimes you simply have to accept the fact that there will be  
accidents.   You cannot change the doors.   You cannot tell people  
they cannot park along the streets for hundreds of miles because  
there are trolleys there.   And you can't eliminate all forms of  
transportation because there are fools in the world.

And we forgot the lesson when the Boeing-Vertol cars were built for  
San Francisco.   They had plug doors.   I can only imagine neophyte  
passengers trying to push them open.

The point remains that the ADA law requires accessible equipment.    
Low floor cars are easily accessible and are common world wide.    
Will they stand up to a loaded semi hitting them broadside at 80  
mph?   I doubt it but then we don't have loaded semis going through  
intersections in cities at 80 mph as a rule.   Will they stand up to  
an automobile going 30 mph?   Probably.    But we're not going back  
to the era where we told our disabled to stay the hell at home just  
because someone is unhappy with the design.

Here low-floor versus platforms versus handicapped lifts results in a  
compromise.   Most of us do not want wide station platforms that  
would be needed for lifts in the middle of our streets.   Motorists  
also do not want things they can hit.   Pedestrians are OK.   They're  
soft.   Nice to hit.   Safety islands and concrete / steel ramps or  
elevators are not nice.   They damage automobiles driven by the  
visually challenged.   Therefore we don't like them.   A low floor  
car is an idea compromise.

Perhaps we need to take just a little more responsibility for life  
instead of using tort attorneys as a lottery system and quit worrying  
about what might happen.   Look at the bright side of life instead of  
hunting for the ugly.

fws


On Sep 20, 2009, at 4:35 PM, Joshua Dunfield wrote:

> 2009/9/20 Phillip Clark Campbell <pcc_sr at yahoo.com>:
>> Transit designers are not responsible for the death of those
>> who choose other forms of transportation;  I heartily disagree
>> this is part of the equation.
>
> Suppose that (perhaps after a genuinely horrible transit accident) the
> folks in charge decided to cease all transit service in a city.
>
> Are you saying that the people responsible for that decision would not
> be (indirectly) responsible for the likely increase in traffic deaths,
> because none of the deaths involved transit?  Indirect responsibility
> is still responsibility, isn't it?
>
> What if it was a 25% service cut instead of a 100% service cut?  Does
> that make the decisionmakers not responsible, because the public
> should have accepted the inconvenience and continued riding?
>
> What if it was a well-intentioned attempt to increase safety that,
> unintentionally, inconvenienced riders, leading some to drive instead?
>
> It would be nice if transportation safety was simple and didn't
> require weighing one set of dangers against another (always
> imperfectly), but that's not how it works.
>
> -j.
>
>