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Amtrak Installing Cameras To Watch Train Engineers
An anonymous reader writes: In the aftermath of the derailment of an Amtrak train in Philadelphia a couple weeks ago, the company has caved to demands that it install video cameras to monitor and record the actions of the engineers driving their trains. The National Transportation Safety Board has been recommending such cameras for the past five years. Amtrak CEO Joe Boardman says the cameras will improve train safety, though the engineers' union disagrees. In 2013, the union's president said, "Installation of cameras will provide the public nothing more than a false sense of security. More than a century of research establishes that monitoring workers actually reduces the ability to perform complex tasks, such as operating a train, because of the distractive effect."
It will not improve safety. It will increase accountability which MAY in turn improves safety.
They used to be called engineers in the UK, in the early days, then the term fell out of use. The original term was "engine-man". BBC articles are so helpful.
While I'm not fully aware of the details of this story, it really seems to me that they are only looking to put the blame on the weakest side, which is obviously the workers. Even if the guy did screw up, it would be ridiculous to think a camera would be capable of preventing an accident. Where are the technical failsafes to limit the train's speed? Guess true security updates have been eaten by their desire for profit and instead been replaced with cheap cameras so they can say "oh no, we were watching the guy but he was a terrorist who shut down the camera" or any other crap to get their fat a$$es out of the way.
"I decided I could write something better than everything out there in two weeks. And I was right." - Linus Torvalds
Next up, cams in the cubicles of software and hardware engineers to see which one is writing the most buggy code?
Of course, the same observation could be made about monitoring police officers, day care workers, teachers, etc., but that hasn't stopped the demands to put them under video surveillance, has it?
Train engineers are federal employees, and the lives of hundreds are in their hands. Now it's their turn to be watched.
"Google Train"
I can understand the engineer's union attitude towards this. Would YOU want a camera on you all day? Do we really need to know whether the engineer picks his nose? OTOH it really should deter people from, e.g., talking on the phone while they're supposed to be driving. To balance the preventive threat and the privacy issue, the video should be under seal somehow, and wiped after a few days - unwatched! - if nothing interesting happened that day. Maybe an hour of each person gets viewed once a week or so, which hour and which day chosen at random, just like drivers never knowing when there's a police car sitting on the shoulder around a bend.
You can know you are being monitored, but still have to explicitly go out of your way to find the camera... and if that's what's really distracting them from doing their job, then that's a conscious choice on their part to stop doing their job in the first place, and look for the camera (and if they already know exactly where it is, then it's a still a deliberate choice to think about the camera's location instead of concentrating on their job). Either way, the camera or its location are not to blame for the distraction.
Lots of people work at jobs where they are continuously monitored via cctv, and in general being monitored by a camera that is out of the way of where one needs to work does not really interfere with one's productivity or effectiveness at all. The union's president is being a whiner.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Pretty sure no cameras, other than for making movies for entertainment, were put in engine cabs for most of the last century. If they're trying to equate some meddlesome stuffed suit bothering workers as opposed a camera, that is a stretch.
Maybe install the friggin speed arrestors that should have been in that particular train back in 2012. I'd rather KNOW that the passengers are safe, instead of being able to watch the engineer fall asleep at the switch after the fact.
You are aware that plenty of people are monitored for their entire shift in much less safety critical jobs, like bank tellers, grocery or retail store cashiers, dock workers, etc, yes? As to the speed being controlled by computer, they've been working on that for some time, but apparently the radio network to convey all the necessary information to the control box is massively behind schedule.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Ah, there it is. The obligatory US bash. Got it in early, too.
If driverless automobiles are plausible (with generally two degrees/ranges of motion), why do we need a human to "drive" something that can generally only go in one direction?
Compared to automating or more frequent inspection of tracks prone to fatigue do to shared freight use.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
It's called positive train control.
All that stuff you see with automation? Yeah, there are lots of systems out there that are tried and true.
Why doesn't amtrak have it? I'm sure it has to do a lot about $$ and the unions pushing to not have it. It's the first step towards train automation.
There are many more simplistic systems which have it and it's working fine. Many trams are all automated for years and the concepts are the same. They usually have the ability to keep the driver/operator/engineer (PR terms for train drivers is very odd) optional for the system to override it if necessary.
Sounds like everything is still very manual and very little progress has been made in the past 30 years to bring them up to the 21st century.
For the same reason you still have plenty of humans working to build cars... the auto & rail labor unions are rather strong.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The engineer's job is to feed the dog.
The dog's job is to bit the engineer if he screws with the controls.
If the engineers' concentration is so fragile that they are going to be distracted by a camera, they are obviously not the right people to be operating complex machinery.
Maybe we should just replace them with automation and run the trains remotely. They could keep one engineer per train to engage the manual override in the event that someone hacks the control infrastructure and tries to do Bad Things(tm) to the trains.
They should if the vehicle is public transportation, like a cab or Uber driver. There is no slope here, slippery or otherwise. It's about keeping an eye on people who are responsible for the safety of others.
Why do you care?
It's sad that the rest of the world still feels the need to match us while acting like we are crap.
It's sad that the rest of the world still feels the need to match us while acting like we are crap.
I'm sorry, what? We're too busy laughing at the USA! USA! stuff we see on TV.
Several years back on Amtrak Pacific line, I kept seeing the engineer leaving the engine for extended periods of time. Out of pure curiosity, I let the car, went through the inside of the engine, made it into the cockpit, and NOONE was there!! I've asked freight engineers how this was possible and they thought it wasn't since they have a deadman's switch to deal with. Frankly, I don't know how Amtrak has gotten away with this all these years.
More than a century of research establishes that monitoring workers actually reduces the ability to perform complex tasks, such as operating a train, because of the distractive effect.
Citation please? I'm an industrial engineer professionally and monitoring of workers is a pretty big part of my professional life. I'm not aware of any credible evidence that as a general principle that monitoring workers reduces ability to perform tasks. Perhaps a clumsy system in specific circumstances but claims of any "distracting effect" sound like union representative talking points rather than actual scientific facts. In fact in my experience the opposite is typically true. I find that people tend to be more vigilant when they are aware they are being monitored as a general rule. Some people dislike it but as long as they aren't interrupted the monitoring is rarely actually distracting. Pilots in aircraft have everything they say monitored and yet somehow they manage to operate a vehicle that is even more complex than a train quite competently.
Speaking as someone who spent three and a half years working on Positive Train Control software, it's not as simple as throwing a GPS on the train.
There are a huge number of operating rules that must be enforced besides just a base speed limit. Not only does every mile of track have a speed limit that can vary widely, every type of train has a maximum safe operating speed that must also be considered. Then there are all the temporary speed limits that the computer has to know about. If there's a work crew out on the tracks, they drop the speed limit. If there's damage to the track, they drop the speed limit. etc. Then there are all the signals along the route. There's half a dozen different types across the country depending on what has been upgraded and what hasn't and they all govern how fast you are allowed to go at that location at that time. Then you have to throw in all of the other things along the track like grade crossings and switches. There's a bunch of different types of each and they all have different rules on what you have to do when you approach them. To top it off, you can't go anywhere until a dispatcher grants you authority to run on the track. And that's done in any of a dozen different ways depending on who owns the track and where it is.
Did I mention that the operating rules are different for each railroad? They are and you have to make sure you follow the right rules.
Then you can have the added complexity of interoperability. Every railroad, by contract, is allowed to operate on each others track. They even contract out engineers between each other. So you can have a BNSF engineer operating a CSX locomotive on UP track. And you have to have to figure out which rules apply in that case because they're different than an Amtrak engineer operating the same CSX locomotive on the same UP track. Or a BNSF engineer operating a KCS locomotive on UP track.
Then when you think you have that all figured out, throw in the fact that we have agreements with Canada that let our trains run back and forth between two countries.
Once you have all of that complexity, you have to be able to predict how long it takes to slow a train down so you know how far back you have to get off the throttle and/or hit the brakes. That calculation is impacted by the number of cars in the train, the weight of the cars, the grade of the track, the curves you're riding on, and even how long it takes for the air pressure to be let out of the brake line (a long time in a mile long train). There's a ton of calculus being done by the computer several times a second to keep an accurate estimation of your braking curve. Beyond that, the computer has to give the engineer a warning before cutting in and doing his job for him. So you have to predict the stopping distance with the added distance you'd travel if you wait a specified time after warning but before you enforce the stop.
Now, you have all of that. Then you have to factor in that your GPS isn't always accurate so you can't always count on the fact that it will tell you precisely where you are. Running through a tunnel cuts off your GPS feed. As you get towards the mouth of the tunnel, you get a lot of multipath errors that make your GPS location jump around pretty damn fast so you have to program the computer to account for it. The backup is the wheel tachometer that lets the computer know how fast the train is going and you can assume that a train isn't going to be jumping off the tracks 500 feet into a field to the left so that does make the job a little easier. But just when you think you've solved the problem, you have to deal with the fact that the diameter of the wheel isn't 100% constant. Sure, it's a steel wheel and it doesn't change rapidly. But it does wear down as the train is driven. So you have to keep calibrating the wheel diameter over the miles because even a small variation can lead to a significant position error over a long trip. A 0.1% error over a 1,000 mile trip will have you a mile off from where you really are. And 1,000 mile trips are a daily occurrence with trains.
So yeah, it's not as easy as just throwing a GPS on your locomotive and calling it good.
Even Mussolini made it illegal to report that the trains didn't run on time.
Wait, hang on.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
A human in the cockpit is going to assess those situations much faster than an automated system can in many of these situations.
Depends on the human and depends on the automation and depends on the circumstances. Your assertion is far to broad to be correct as a general proposition.
You want to stop trains from speeding? screw the cameras, Put GPS in the engine
Already being worked on but controlling train speed isn't quite that simple. GPS has trouble in some locations on the ground so a reliable speed limiting system would necessitate something a bit more complicated. However I agree that there really isn't any good reason not to have it be a part of the technology package on trains.
I bet the only time it's a distraction is when you have a helicopter boss who is constantly nagging you if you aren't always 100% focused on your task. If it's a passive recording system for after-the-fact investigation and that's it, it's much less of a distraction.
No, you don't. You see what we choose to show you, and you react in precisely the way we want and expect you to react. And you help us by telling yourself that it's your idea.
And there it is the obligatory jingoist retard who can't deal with the fact that the US isn't number one, but more like number eleven. American patriots probably just assumed the second one is a typo for an exclamation point, probably a consequence of their red state public schooling.
Or perhaps the obligatory jingoist retard was trying to be factual.
It was a reasonable thing for the poster to say.
USA's freight rail network has long been acknowledged as the best in the world, but I had to wonder what the status is now.
Question for you regarding freight rail service.
Where did you get that the USA is "more like number eleven"?
So, I looked it up.
A search gave me many USA #1 articles like this:
https://www.aar.org/Background...
And I found that by number of kilometres of rail, the USA (225,000) is double #2, China (112,000)
But then again, there's the amount of freight carried.
Here's a couple of links for rail tonnage-miles:
The trend is clearly for China holding the lead in recent years by about 15%
http://www.statista.com/statis...
http://www.statista.com/statis...
What I could not find was stats for delivery performance (how long to load/unload and travel), or on-time performance.
Question for you regarding freight rail service.
Where did you get that the USA is "more like number eleven"?
I bet the only time it's a distraction is when you have a helicopter boss who is constantly nagging you if you aren't always 100% focused on your task.
More or less yes. Monitoring is not the same as micromanaging. When part of your job is public safety (pilots, engineers, cops, etc) then a bit of passive monitoring is very much in the public interest and generally will outweigh the worker's right to privacy while performing their job.
But, but... Google can drive a car you know.....
Interesting but you forgot some stuff... Often trains travel without being able to stop within the distance the engineer can see, so putting all the above in some kind of complex system still doesn't prevent the most common accidents. There is no way you can keep some nutty driver from parking a bus full of people on the tracks or some crazy gravel truck trying to beat the train across the crossing.
People are acting like the automatic enforcement of speed limits is going to fix the main source of train accidents, and it's simply not. Yea, it might keep trains from coming off the tracks in a turn once and awhile, but this is a tiny fraction of accidents.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Last time I read about it, it's estimated that PTC will only stop about 40% of the accidents.
Thing is, as complicated as PTC really is, it's still the low hanging fruit that's the easier problem to solve than most of the rest. And considering that it will save lives, it's worth it in the long term.
Track and equipment maintenance standards being beefed up will account for another chunk. But you're right. It's really difficult to plan for that dipshit who stops on the tracks around a blind corner.
Having worked on fully autonomous wheeled systems the requirements of the train system you describe sounds like a pleasure to work with because it is pretty well constrained. For the position problem you describe I recommend a properly tuned Extended Kalman Filter to automatically "calibrate the wheel diameter over the miles". It can even incorporate the intermittent GPS data to boot! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... There are alternative methods to this that may be worth consideration as well but this would be a good start. For more consult your friendly neighborhood robotics motion planning and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) textbooks, and research papers if you want the latest. I'm sure considering train requirements more proven technology that has been rigorous enough to make it into textbooks would be preferred.
He's obviously not talking about freight, he's talking about passenger transportation. Since the US spans a continent, and has large ports on both coasts, and also because it produces a lot of raw materials for export (such as coal), it's no surprise it does a lot of freight hauling on railroads. But that doesn't help people who need to get somewhere. The days of hobos are long past.
Yeah. We had that problem solved a while back. I was just bringing up the fact that a GPS is nice but it's not 100% reliable, especially in canyons and tunnels. And the backup system wasn't as simple as plugging in another sensor. It requires more work than that.
The point being made is that "GPS and some simple software" isn't going to cut it. It's a difficult problem to solve. A lot more difficult than you might think if you didn't have the background to really know what is involved.
A light rail system is a whole different ball game from the common rail system. Sure, if you could build a whole new system that only had automated trains on it, automation would be easy because you could purpose build the automation systems into your infrastructure.
However, in this case, the problem is pretty complex and where I think it *could* be automated with sufficient effort and cost, I seriously doubt it's going to be cost effective. Railroads run on razor thin margins as it is, with huge equipment and infrastructure maintenance costs, so I don't think they want to fund this. Paying some guy to "drive" is not a huge cost overall, and if it lets them keep their existing infrastructure and limp along for now, that's what they will do.
SO.. Unless they mandate this by regulation, the railroads won't step up and do it on their own. It's not like the transition from steam to diesel where there was a huge gain in operating costs and efficiency and a huge drop in manpower needed. When it was real profit, they couldn't build locomotives fast enough.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
you can assume that a train isn't going to be jumping off the tracks 500 feet into a field to the left so that does make the job a little easier.
Too bad Google Maps doesn't make that kind of assumption.
More than a century of research establishes that monitoring workers actually reduces the ability to perform complex tasks, such as operating a train, because of the distractive effect.
Considering that CCTV have only been readily available for the last 40 years is the other 60 years of study even relevant? I would consider a camera sitting unobtrusively in a corner as being very different than a person staring at me every second. In the latter case I would be concerned that the person would jump in and chastise/correct me if I didn't do what he thought I should be doing. That would make me second guess myself and would be as distraction. A camera could not do that and would not be an issue.
I don't here many saying it's not *possible* only that it is not practical and cost effective.
Sure, you want automated trains, we can do that, but remember that our rail road system is a patch work of private and public companies which runs on a regulation scheme that was largely fleshed out before the turn of the 20th century (over 100 years ago). Plus, the incentive for automation by the rail roads would be largely cost, unless the regulations are forcing them into it. The salaries of the engineer and conductor on a train are a pittance compared to the total operating costs of the train, so there is little incentive to automate. Just keep the human in the loop, it's cheaper in the short term. Rail Roads run on razor thin margins... So profit today is very important.
The reason we are having this "camera" discussion is more about political points than actually trying to help the system get safer. Cameras won't help anything, except the political fortunes of those suggesting them. The vast majority of fatal accidents involving trains will never be prevented by cameras OR automation because they have to do with vehicles being on the tracks at crossings when the train arrives. You might have great video of the accident, or get the breaks applied a few milliseconds sooner with automation, but neither will prevent people getting killed..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
they are only looking to put the blame on the weakest side, which is obviously the workers
The engineers (a.k.a. "the workers") are backed by one of the most powerful unions in the country. They are are not weak by any definition.
The point of the camera is to help establish what happened. If the engineer screwed up then he should face the consequences; if he did nothing wrong then the camera would verify that he did everything right.
Yes, all that may be true, but enforcing permanent speed limits via a self-contained system would have prevented several major accidents and could have been implemented in minimum time and money so it could actually have been deployed. All that fancy-ass consideration has driven up the price and delayed the implementation of anything at all except the sharp wits of a tired old train engineer, who probably doesn't know how worn the wheels are and only remembers a few of the thousands of regulations that some desk jockey put in place without knowing how it was going to affect train operations.
Here's prime example of the perfect being the enemy of the good, and you're failing to see it in front your face. Trains are crashing, dude.
More than a century of research establishes that monitoring workers actually reduces the ability to perform complex tasks, such as operating a train, because of the distractive effect.
Don't but that at all, my personal experience has been the cameras become just another thing you don't notice, the implication of the above is the employee is constantly aware of the camera.
This just isn't how people function, the get used to and ignore everyday things.
Additionally I suspected this engineer was on his phone, but I read 2 different versions, one where his phone was locked into a box in the cab, the other where he "pulled his phone from his bag" immediately after the wreck, implying it was out of "the box".
The manually controlled train should have been slowing to approach the curve with a reduced speed limit of 80 mph (130 km/h) in its approach, and 50 mph (80 km/h) within it.[2][11][13][14] But instead, the train had accelerated into the curve and was traveling at 106 mph (171 km/h) when its engineer[6] applied the emergency brake, and 102 mph (164 km/h) when it derailed, according to Robert L. Sumwalt, the National Transportation Safety Board's lead investigator, who cited the train's onboard event recorder recovered from the wreckage
If it is manually controlled, and he entered that turn at that speed, how could it be anything but engineer error?
He was on his fucking cell phone, and that's why they are dragging their feet releasing details and trying to get the media to focus on an impact mark on the wind shield.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Exactly, that comment in the article is disingenuous at best.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
A lot of the preventable accidents aren't caused by engineers blowing the baseline speed limits. They're caused by blowing temporary speed limits, signals, and authority limits. And if you're going to the trouble of adding all of the equipment to stop a train blowing a speed limit, the incremental cost to add the rest of it isn't all that high. Given that the whole system will prevent orders of magnitude more accidents makes the added cost worth it.
So yeah, it's not as easy as just throwing a GPS on your locomotive and calling it good.
Still, even a partial solution (e.g. one that matches the train's GPS location, if known, against a table of specified maximum-safe-under-any-circumstances speed limits for that location) would prevent a train wreck in certain cases (such as the recent one that prompted this article). I'm all for full PTC, but I don't think the perfect needs to be made the enemy of the good here.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
PTC will only get about 40% of the accidents. A GPS and baseline speed limit enforcer would be a very small fraction of that because most of that 40% of accidents has nothing to do with the baseline speed limit. It's mostly temporary speed zones, signals, and authority violations.
That false sense of security is just what the public wants. The TSA is doing exactly that for airplanes.
Seriously, consider the recent derailment that has triggered this announcement. They already know the train was accelerating into the curve, and travelling faster than any permanent speed limit would allow. A GPS-based system (including accelerometers to assist the GPS when going through tunnels) would have been able to advise the engineer that the train was travelling at nearly twice the permanent posted speed, perhaps with a loud, audible warning that could alert an engineer that may have been distracted by idiots throwing rocks at the train, (with a time-limited shut-off to handle the case when the GPS is showing the wrong speed or location). It could even, be allowed to stop acceleration and apply brakes if not overridden within a few seconds of its warning by an alert engineer. It could even have a little video camera in it, and store the last 30 minutes of movement. It could even be made as an Android or iPhone app with no hardware development (save the USB-connection to slow the train), so it could be deployed in a matter of months instead of decades, at a cost that wouldn't need an Act of Congress to fund.
But sure, go ahead and give the public what it wants.
Here they call them computer programmers.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
It's a train he has no right to privacy.
Not strictly true at least with regard to being monitored by an employer. There are Federal and often State laws regarding whether recording is permitted in some circumstances. While employers usually have wide latitude they cannot legally record anywhere without limitation. Furthermore when a union gets involved then the right of the company to record may be subject to a collective bargaining agreement.
Plain old walking isn't very safe (>6000 deaths per year average [includes bicyclists]), and much less safe than passengers on a train (7 deaths per year average).
Of course, it's because of those other forms of transportation that walking isn't safe.
http://journalistsresource.org...
The right doesn't "want stuff" taken from other people. They want to earn it.
They don't want stuff taken from other people? Bullshit. They just want the private sector to do the taking instead of the public sector. The right is all about removing restrictions from banks, deregulating industries, allowing companies to dump whatever they want into our streams, lakes and air, etc. They very much want to take things and they don't want to pay taxes so they don't have to give anything back. They are very happy to take away your rights if they don't like what you do. They want to take away women's reproductive rights. If you are an atheist they're very eager to take away your freedom to avoid organized religion. If you are gay they want to take away your right to love whomever you want. They're very eager to spend an absurd amount of money on defense and instead of taxing an appropriate amount they instead borrow the money burdening future generations.
The right doesn't take stuff? Give me a break...
I can understand the engineer's union attitude towards this. Would YOU want a camera on you all day? Do we really need to know whether the engineer picks his nose?
Pretty much everyone in retail has a camera on them all day. Anyone working at an airport too. And a bank. Airline pilots don't have a camera but they do have everything they say recorded. Stock traders have every piece of electronic and phone correspondence tracking in some manner.
Fact is that having a camera on you is not that big a deal as long as it is done above board and with reasonable privacy accommodations. They're really only going to review the tape if they think there is a problem. And if you are worried about whether you'll be seen picking your nose, then don't pick your nose.
Their concern is more to do with how people react under stressful situations when snap decisions are required. Knowing that your every move is being recorded and will be intensely scrutinized after the fact can alter those decisions.
That's a cop-out if I've ever heard one. Airline pilots have everything they say and every interaction with the controls recorded on every flight and somehow they manage to execute their duties quite well even in crash situations. If a train engineer is doing something they aren't supposed to be doing then they should damn well expect to get a spanking for it. Any equivocation on this point is simply trying to weasel out of being responsible for their actions.
radio?? well there is your problem. ... red means slow, etc...
Just paint the railroad ties a different color for each max allowed speed, then install a color sensor under the car.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
I think the union just acknowledged that nobody is safe with their drivers, no matter what. Shameful that they are pressing the attack in light of the fact that one of their drivers is responsible.
No I am using the term "drivers" divisively. If they truly were engineers, they would be demanding safety protocols to be implemented and equipment to be installed.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Here they call them rockstar brogrammers
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
PTC will only get about 40% of the accidents.
ONLY!?!? If there were only two accidents a year (note, correct use of "only"), that would totally be worth it. How high is the bar before this is justified? What's the drawback? After implementing PTC (assuing a 40% reduction in accidents), it'd be damn near impossible to have such a significant impact on the number of accidents with any other solution**.
** I know there's another 60% left, but those are going to be the more difficult cases by their very nature. The other solution would have to further reduce accidents by another 66% (4/6ths) to match the same level of added safety.
I doubt you meant to imply they should not implement it, but 40% is quite significant.
If Amtrak management were really interested in safety, they'd put a second person in the cab. Like airplanes. Why not switch to a single pilot and a camera? How safe would that make you feel?
We are becoming so reactionary that soon every passenger on the trains will have personal came focused on them - you know, just to see who to blame if there is an accident.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Do you remember what your colleagues were wearing last Friday, before the start of a three day weekend? Most likely not. Unless you do something memorable, whatever it is you are currently doing is going to be out of your colleagues short-term memory in a matter of seconds, and any testimony is hearsay. Whereas video is not hearsay, and lasts as long as it is stored.
I doubt you meant to imply they should not implement it, but 40% is quite significant.
I covered that in some of my other posts.
You are aware that's because of the risk of theft, yes? What is a train operator going to steal?
Yes, the American Exceptionalist Butthurt. Even when your best is half what other countries with far less money can do....'Murica! Fuck yeah!
It is sad how other countries know so little about the U.S. That they take the behavior of a small minority of people in a couple of states and try to define the entire nation by it.
You do realize there are 50 whole states in the union, right?
You're aware the cabin cameras are to prevent mass death, yes? Who is a store clerk going to kill?
Probably because we don't want to spend 7 days going from LA to NY with 19th century technology when we can do it in less than 0.5 days using 20th century technology.
Or if it's only 300 miles away we still prefer a car because we can depart and return on whatever schedule we want, and when we get there we have our own self provided means of transportation that we can use on-demand instead of paying up the ass for a taxi or a rental car.
It's called being practical, and that's why we don't give a shit about passenger rails.
I'm sorry, what? We're too busy laughing at the USA! USA! stuff we see on TV.
Exactly, because where you come from, the proof for every answer to every question can be backed with "I saw it on TV" and everybody instantly knows its true, making your country the smartest in the world. And every time somebody mentions something that Americans do, you reply with "well in the rest of the world, we do it this way" as if your country itself is the rest of the world, and that combined with the knowledge that you're better than Americans in every way instantly makes you proud to be from wherever it is you're from.
Union is lucky honestly, trains are prime targets for automation. Would seem like it'd have been a lot smarter to just do away with drivers and tele-operate/automate all train engines. The days of having a human on board are very very numbered. I think the cameras is a waste of time and money. Just automate/centralize it already.
Also calling them engineers is stupid. Train operators long ago diverged from what engineers are. They're operators.
For the same reason you still have plenty of humans working to build cars... the auto & rail labor unions are rather strong.
For now. But that won't last, automation is going to take over this stuff, and very soon. Especially when people see it's safer to have computers operating these things than humans. Unions have pull now, but they will lose eventually, they always lose to automation. Always will.
Trains don't really wander around randomly. So its not necessary to use the GPS system. Fixed point emitters over the tracks using simple technology would exactly position the train and insure reception no matter what the conditions. Even inside a tunnel.
I understand that putting new hardware into the trains is hard, expensive and difficult to clear for safety. But putting new hardware into the operators hands is not. Put a friggin electronic helmet on his head with a siren that goes off if the train is too fast for its registered weight / vs the track he is on. Tell him he fired if the siren goes off.
Heck, put a tens unit on it.
Nascar Race? You mean because they "raise" the flag and sing the National Anthem before the race and usually launch fireworks after it? Nearly every sporting event in the US starts with raising the flag and singing the National Anthem. I've been told Toronto (Ontario, Canada) Blue Jays (Major League Baseball) games are preceded by two national anthems. I see a few Canadian flags here in Wisconsin along with some Swedish and Norwegian ones as well. Plenty of Mexican ones flying in early May. I haven't heard of anyone getting to upset by it.
I've also heard "engine driver" used.
A couple quick searches tell me that there are about 250,000 miles of railroad in the US and about 3,000,000 miles of paved road. Waze running on my smartphone seems to be able to warn me when I'm going 10 MPH over the limit pretty reliably. Given that the railroad network is less dense than auto roads it seems clear that it should be doable to create a similar device for trains that, at a minimum, warns the engineer when they are exceeding the speed limit for a given stretch of track. Throw in mobile data based updates of track conditions to handle track damage or construction work and it seems like something like this should improve the situation.
Building a perfect automated speed control system is not the only way to improved safety, we can move the needle a lot by providing by human operators with better data and warnings. Don't let the quest for the perfect solution block comparatively easy incremental progress.
Nascar Race? You mean because they "raise" the flag and sing the National Anthem before the race and usually launch fireworks after it? Nearly every sporting event in the US starts with raising the flag and singing the National Anthem.
Yeah... that's the thing. Singing the anthem at each and every tiny sporting event looks really odd and jingoistic to most of the rest of the world. We don't do anything like that at our sporting events in England unless they're particularly noteworthy (FA cup final, etc), and even then it's sometimes booed, or mostly ignored.
Wow! A whole 100 years. Incredible. That's sooo long!
You just described two days of work. Maybe a week. What else?
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Is there an problem not caused b labor unions? We should outlaw the right to free speech and the freedom to assemble to prevent these abuses.
Learn to love Alaska
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Testimony of something you have witnessed is not hearsay, at least not in the UK.
There's a reason they play the National Anthem of the winners for the Olympics. You shouldn't be ashamed of your Anthem or boo it, ever. Maybe ignoring it makes sense (it can be a bit "over the top" sometimes) but booing should definitely be considered bad form.
Just because England doesn't do it doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't do it.
Once again we all fall victim to bad generalities based upon our own perspectives, rather than actually speaking about things we know.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Whether or not it's "law" he has no right to privacy when my life is on the line.
That's a nonsense argument in such a general form because your life is constantly on the line. You ever drive a car? Do you insist that every other driver be monitored? Because you are at FAR higher statistical risk in your car than you are on any train or airplane and yet we don't insist on monitoring there.
The question is whether monitoring is reasonably likely to have a significant safety benefit. Black boxes in airliners and trains have obvious value in determining causes of crashes after the fact. Video monitoring of retail establishments has a clear benefit in reducing theft. Video monitoring of train engineers? Maybe... but the case isn't obvious because there are other options worth considering. Might be that a better solution is automation of speed controls. Might be that a better solution is a second engineer. Financial resources are finite so we should take a little time to figure out what the best solution is rather than reflexively going to the first idea we think of.
Now don't get me wrong, I agree that professionals responsible for public safety can and should expect reasonable monitoring while engaged in their professional duties. But note the word reasonable because it is important. There are legal, ethical and practical limits to what we can and should monitor. We don't have a right to view them on the toilet even if they are on duty.
When people are on the job I see no reason they can't be monitored, that's why cops wear body cameras, their cars have dash cams, that's why trains should have cameras, and so should pilots, because if you knew what pilots were doing you probably wouldn't fly.
In some cases monitoring is quite reasonable and appropriate. In others it is pointless, wasteful and/or intrusive. Reflexively saying they should all be monitored at all times shows that you don't grasp all the nuances involved. Like you I support cameras as a general proposition but there are times when they are either useless or wasteful. There is no one size fits all answer.
Oh and I know very well what pilots do in the cockpit. I also know they have a rather spectacular safety record so I'm not especially worried about it.
There's no good reason NOT to have a camera in a train cab, cockpit, body cam, dash cam, etc, if it's ON THE JOB.
If the camera has minimal or no demonstrable safety benefit or if there are alternatives to the camera that would have a bigger bang for the buck in improving safety then there is a very good reason to not have the camera.
There also are significant (though often solvable) practical logistical and technology and economic issues in deploying cameras and saving the results. Do not be so quick to dismiss these challenges because they are not trivial or unimportant. Camera deployment isn't simply a matter of walking over to best buy and buying a few GoPros.
I'm not aware of any credible evidence that as a general principle that monitoring workers reduces ability to perform tasks.
"Complex" is the key term. Generally speaking, there is an optimal level of psychological arousal for performing given tasks. For tasks that are simple, rote, and/or well-learned, that level is higher than it is for tasks that are difficult or novel. In the specific case of knowing that you are being observed, it tends to decrease performance on difficult tasks and have varying results on simple tasks. See Social facilitation.
The question here is whether or not the job of train operator qualifies as simple and rote, or difficult. I could easily see it being the former, where the tasks are not difficult, and the challenge is to maintain attention or vigilance. If that is the case, then the awareness of being monitored could well improve performance in itself.
(no sig)
Who needs passenger trains?
People who want to travel in comfort, rather than like a sardine.
Perhaps you should read this post, then refute anything in it:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
You can try and slam us for our public transportation all you like, but until you live here, you have no idea of the challenges of public transport, or why we choose not to pay massive amounts of money for something no one uses except in the compact cities.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
It is sad how other countries know so little about the U.S. That they take the behavior of a small minority of people in a couple of states and try to define the entire nation by it.
Yeah, just like the small minority of Muslims who burn American Flags.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
There's a reason they play the National Anthem of the winners for the Olympics.
Sure, but what is the reason to play it a minor league game? Do Americans need a reminder of where they are?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I know it is popular to push the BS that the USA is special in every way, but the fact is that in quite a few categories, the US is only special in the small bus definition.
"Singing the anthem at each and every tiny sporting "
I'm no NASCAR fan, but their "tiny" events often average nearly 100k people (https://www.google.com/#safe=off&q=nascar+average+attendance) which is more than the FA cup finals has had in 25+ years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FA_Cup_finals)
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
how about you pay for a few of your immoral wars instead of trying to blame your victims. then you can pretend you are equipped to talk about earning anything.
if you can't directly and personally benefit from something, you are going to whine about having to support it.
Sure, but what is the reason to play it a minor league game? Do Americans need a reminder of where they are?
Sometimes they do need a reminder. Sometimes we just do things out of tradition. Sometimes we do things simply because we like it. Sometimes, we do things to "prove" something. Even if it's just a "minor league game" it's important to someone who's there. Whether it's the players who'll never make it to the big leagues or the kids who only get to see their dad on occasions like that or whatever. Just because you think it's trivial doesn't make it trivial for everyone else.
I find it all a bit ridiculous, personally, but to argue that the US is the only place this happens is also inaccurate. They do it at baseball games in Korea and Japan, if my memory serves properly.
Not exactly a rarity for people to feel pride in their place of residence.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
You wouldn't want to spend money to hire ANOTHER PERSON IN THE CAB, so that the whole train isn't depending on ONE ENGINEER, now, would you?
The railroads have been working to get rid of anyone more than the engineer for decades. With the position labelled fireman gone, that's *one* person. How would you feel about, say, an commercial airliner with *one* person flying the plane?
How many hours are they on, with no company, no one to keep them awake, and only one set of eyes on things?
Stupid.
mark
nyone who says that Americans can't get over their not being number one in passenger rail has never talked to an American about the topic.
I completely disagree. There's tons of jingoist retards out there who think America is #1 in everything. You're probably not going to find many on Slashdot, because people here tend to have a decent level of education, but go talk to drooling Fox News watchers who dropped out of high school and you'll find them. These people are completely clueless how things are in the rest of the world. And they make up a very large voting bloc, so you can't disregard them as irrelevant.
I have zero credentials compared to you but ... what I got from your post is that "there is a complex environment that is changing in time and lot of rules that must be followed" - well, I thought that this exactly the domain where computers are much superior to human.
Yep. Tons of details to keep track of. Lots of opportunity to miss something and have a mishap. A computer that is programmed right is a much better tool for keeping track of everything all at once. And the way it's being designed, it just sits there silently until the operator starts doing something that can cause a problem. It gives the operator a reminder while (if) there's still time before taking over and stopping the train. But it also provides useful information on the screen about what's coming up on the route, much like a GPS in your car, so it unobtrusively helps remind the operator of things they might be forgetting.
Once they get it installed and work out a good deal of the bugs, it will be a pretty good system.
I find it all a bit ridiculous, personally, but to argue that the US is the only place this happens is also inaccurate. They do it at baseball games in Korea and Japan, if my memory serves properly.
Not exactly a rarity for people to feel pride in their place of residence.
Funny you should mention baseball - "The Star-Spangled Banner" was already commonly played at baseball games years before it became the national anthem. And it seems they didn't play the (de facto) anthem "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" back then. Maybe it's less patriotism, and more stubbornness to change any rituals, or even superstition.
http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/6957582/the-history-national-anthem-sports-espn-magazine
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Nonetheless, I personally don't know any.
That's probably because you don't hang out with rednecks and other uneducated people much.
However, you're probably right about soccer.
Nonetheless, I personally don't know any.
That's probably because you don't hang out with rednecks and other uneducated people much.
However, you're probably right about soccer.
I actually don't know what soccer is. I saw someone on FOX talking about it and guessed it didn't sound like something we would do.
Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Perhaps you could explain why either of you is going on about freight when the subject is passenger service?
You're aware you're still comparing apples to batshit irrelevant oranges, yes? Cameras in banks and stores are to prevent malefactors from walking off with money or goods. There aren't going to be malefactors running trains, unless you have an operator like that suicidal co-pilot who crashed that Germanwings flight. Who DGAF that his actions were being recorded, because he was suicidal.