Trains, tragedy and the light at the end of the tunnel

This morning a colleague of mine saw a man killed at Retreat Station. Trying to force the door of a moving train, my colleague tells me, he slipped onto the rails and was cut in half by the train’s wheels. This is all I know at this stage, and this from a traumatised colleague not quite ready to tell the story.

My office is metres from Observatory Station, Cape Town. Every day I see people hurtling towards the station as the trains pull in, in the hope that they can jump into the carriage before the train leaves. (There, a man has just run past my window, right now.) It’s a deadly pursuit, made more so because the trains still seem able to pull away as people leap through their closing or broken doors. If the train was simply unable to move while its doors stand open, this would not happen. This is not complex or expensive technology. It would cost an electric contact on each door and a conductor on the platform. Would it mean trains would take longer to leave? Yes, for a while, as passengers got used to the system. But soon enough, as anyone who’s travelled on a safe train-system knows, the peer pressure to get the hell away from the doors speeds things up again.

But this is not just about spending money on electronics. It’s about being organised. In the 1980s, New York’s subways had become messy and dangerous. The danger was attributed in part to the fact that the New York City Transit Authority had allowed their trains to be vandalised, mostly with graffiti, to such an extent that their poor state became an excuse for further reckless and malicious behaviour on and around them. This idea was part of a broader syndrome described in the ‘broken windows’ theory (described long before its true success in this 1982 Atlantic Monthly article), which suggested that when a community’s environment improves, so does the behaviour of those that usually cause the most trouble. A broken window suggests that no one cares, so a local might think, ‘Why should I care?’, and so behaviour spirals downwards.

So, as part of a committed effort to making the subways safer, in 1984 the NYCTA set up a painting station at one end of a line, and painted over graffiti every time a train pulled into that station. Some trains were being painted every two hours. Within five years, over six thousand carriages were graffiti-free. (Here’s a concise PDF summary of the programme.)

The point is not that graffiti is dangerous, that crime rates on the subways dropped, or that painting stations will help us here. The point is that someone at the NYCTA had to get very, very organised to paint six thousand trains in five years. It can’t be done without exceptional planning, organisation and determination. Similarly, our trains won’t be safer without similar planning, organisation and determination. This is not a funding issue. It is barely an infrastructural issue. It is an issue of organisation, of executing simple, effective systems well.

If my colleague’s account this morning is accurate, Metrorail’s response will be critical: it will be determined by the value they put on a passenger’s life. And that value should not only be measured in spending or compensation, it should be measured in the commitment of their minds to effective solutions.