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Comment by earthnail | Hacker News Reader

And yet it works surprisingly well.

When I lived in London, people waiting for the tube were leas than an arm’s length away when it rushed in. Blew my mind. Eventually I got used to it and did the same.

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The difference is that the tube driver (assuming there even is one) can't just decide to take a slight turn from the planned route, while the car driver really might.

Yet of all the traffic accidents, the one you describe never happens. So it’s not much difference

Sorry if I misunderstand but you don't think cars come off the road and impact pedestrians? Happens for a myriad of reasons, but it does happen.

It happens all of the time. Cars veering off the road and maiming pedestrians is a fairly common occurrence.

Sorry to cite German sources, but google translate should help you out

August 2024: 8 Year old “caught by a car on the pavement” https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/ulm/kind-be... October 2024: A Mother and two children killed by an SUV that “veered off the road” https://www.merkur.de/deutschland/baden-wuerttemberg/erfasst... May 2025: 2 Children injured, on their way home from school https://www.focus.de/panorama/welt/20-meter-von-schule-entfe... July 2025: 2 pedestrians injured https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/starnberg/starnberg-aut...

It does happen, it happened to me — a driver was distracted (because they were texting while driving) and they veered from the traffic flow and I was hit at 40 mph. The EMS worker who responded to the scene told me two things: 1. They almost never pull people alive from this kind of accident, 2. This kind of head-on, no brakes, distracted driver accident was happening more and more. This was 10 years ago.

The tube follows fixed tracks, which is quite different from cars on a road.

Yeah but look at how normalized it is. All you need to do is slightly misstep, out of the thousands of steps you take, to bump your head on a passing train. You think it’s not possible (part of the trance) but all the parameters are set up so that the slot machine eventually hits the jackpot. You’re 12 inches away from a projectile, and you are to repeat the loop daily for a lifetime. The odds are the odds.

This is why you can run trams in pedestrian only areas and have very few impacts. Trained professional driving it, predictable speed and direction.

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