Also, I thought the trained people should have learned a thing or two from Pompei not to build near volcanoes. I'll cut some slack for the people who designed Pompei, they didn't know, but everyone after that should have learned.
Railroads and highways also invite towns and cities to be built around them, so if you want to be responsible toward future generations of human lives, you should direct those major arteries through less geologically-active regions.
Hugging an active volcano never was a good idea in history and it still isn't.
If someone gave me a contract to build something in modern-day Herculaneum I would say no. I think it's irresponsible to build there. In terms of lives lost it's tantamount to knowingly shipping a hundred 777s with loose screws that cause them to crash.
The number of downvotes on this thread is also exactly why we have disasters with volcanic eruptions. This is like the geological equivalent of a bunch of antivaxxers.