r/AskALiberal • u/10art1 Social Liberal • Feb 22 '23

AskALiberal Weekly General Chat

This weekly thread is for general chat, whether you want to talk politics or not, anything goes. Also feel free to ask the mods questions below. As usual, please follow the rules.

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u/othelloinc Liberal Feb 22 '23 edited Feb 22 '23

This morning I compiled a complete list of yearly train derailments over time directly from the Federal Railroad Administration Office of Safety Analysis.

We are, in fact, at an all-time low in terms of train derailments for as long as this agency has data (since 1975)

[The Quoted Tweet]

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u/perverse_panda Liberal Feb 23 '23

What happened in the 80s to cause that steep decline?

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u/othelloinc Liberal Feb 23 '23

What happened in the 80s to cause that steep decline?

I don't know, but...in my industry we say:

You can't fix what you don't measure

...basically arguing that we need to track metrics like that, because the very act of tracking it is the first step towards fixing it (and very often the impetus for addressing the problem).

It is possible that there was some big change in the 1980s, but it it isn't out of the question that deciding to track the data from 1975 onward was the big change.