Planes without pilots, ships and automatic trains. Although it is the current trend, transport safety still depends a lot on people’s behavior and depriving ourselves of this could be even worse
The tragedy that occurred on Friday 27 February in Milan, with a number nine tram car derailed, two deaths and around forty injuries, leads to a reflection on transport safety in urban areas and beyond. It is no secret that over 70% of accidents in the transport sector (airplanes, trains, vehicles and ships) are caused by the human factor, which demonstrates that in the triangle of interactions formed by the elements “man, environment and machine”, it is we who are the most fallacious. After all, the reliability of machines is always improving, the environment should be monitored (accurate weather forecasts, infrastructures checked, projects calculated in detail), while the human and his behavior are less predictable.
The relationship between man and technology
It is no coincidence that staff training regarding the “human factor” is increasingly present, and in some areas of transport even mandatory and recurring. The ongoing investigation, even before identifying any faults, will therefore have to clarify the technical and human causes, so that countermeasures can be implemented if necessary so that episodes like this do not happen again. Without having any illusions that technology can always “save” us human beings from error. What if today transport is very safeso much so that every year over five billion airline tickets are sold around the world and almost three times as many are sold between waterways and railways, it is important to remember that every measure to improve safety was made after an accident. The presence of lifeboats on board ships, radios to communicate, seat belts (the list is long).
In this scenario, it is also useful to remember that technology has always helped humanity, but never in a free way and without other dangers: From the autopilot of airplanes to the cell phones used while driving a vehicle, we have always found that we need to correct our behavior. New technologies certainly help, but the most modern ones are not always applicable, as demonstrated by the development times of autonomous car driving devices and the problems that manufacturers are encountering today.
From the human to the artificial
So that’s it a certain tendency to eliminate the human from the transport system makes sense. If we talk about railways, it is already done with the metro lines (in Milan the Lilla and Blu have no drivers on board); abroad it is done with certain light trains and shuttles that travel protected and defined routes. In this case, we can mention what was achieved in 2018 by Siemens Mobility in Potsdam, Germany, but also the automatic urban line in Tampere, Finland, built by Škoda Group. In the USA there are automatic metros in many airports (Orlando, Atlanta, New York to name a few), up to the Chinese Autonomous Rail Rapid Transit in operation in Zhuzhou (China), since 2 June 2017.
Because there was the tram tragedy in Milan
No driver, but in the operations rooms there are more people and computers who check the correct functioning of the exercises. It can be objected that it is one thing to travel on a line reserved for that vehicle, it is quite another to cross areas with high traffic variability between pedestrians, cars, motorbikes, scooters and other unpredictable variables, but on closer inspection, Milan’s tram nine traveled on a dedicated roadway. So what? Well, it is precisely from the study of the “human factor” that we learn that each accident is not a unique and isolated event, but the terrible result of a chain of events which often begins long before this occurs: in the case of the Milanese tram, the blow to the foot suffered by the driver who certainly could not imagine that he might faint shortly thereafter.
The same, if we look at other tragedies, was the case for the Morandi Bridge in Genoa with the lack of maintenance, the increase in traffic over the decades and the decay of the materials. So more means, more complexity, more technology, but also more variables: with man having to establish and maintain that balance called security. And, to do this, the imagination and human abilities that we increasingly delegate to machines are still fundamental. As the Americans say: everyone would like an airplane pilot who follows procedures scrupulously, but then, in the event of an accident, if Commander Sullemberger hadn’t been there to improvise a glide into the river, everyone on that flight would have died.
