Today we had a very disastrous accident in our town. An 18-year old high-school girl was hit and killed by a train while crossing the railway tracks behind the high school. This is a shortcut that has been used a lot in the 50 or so years that the high school has been around, and a few students have been killed there over the years, though it has gotten much better in the past decade.
Crossing the train tracks is a shortcut that saves about 15-minutes of walking between the high school and the neighborhood behind it.
My thoughts and prayers are with the girl’s family, and also with the engineer of the train who will have to live with this on his mind for the rest of his life.
There is a long stretch of rail behind the high school, and it is at least an 8 minute walk to the nearest crossing. People have proposed buying some of the land on one side of the tracks and creating an overpass at the midway point, so that bikers and walkers don’t have to go around the tracks.
What has this to do with the bus problem?
I started to think that safety, of all sorts, is a two-way street. We are obliged to encourage safe drivers and penalize bad drivers, but we are also obliged to teach our children, at a young age, not to run out in traffic without looking. Though any accidents will always be viewed legally as the driver’s fault, in practice, that is not always the case.
Likewise, it is a shame that the standards of dress and behavior of the people aboard these buses is so low, but aren’t we also obliged to teach our children how to deal with that? They will inevitably come across low characters in this world.
Having the mehadrin buses, etc., are solutions that are equivalent to only training the drivers of cars to avoid hitting children. But part of the solution is to prepare our children to for some of the people they will inevitably meet, so they will not run out into THAT traffic without looking both ways.