Shankar Vedantam of the Washington Post reports:
Sometime soon, investigators will piece together why one train on Metro’s Red Line hurtled into another last Monday, killing nine people and injuring dozens. Early indications suggest a computer system may have malfunctioned, and various accounts have raised questions about whether the driver of the speeding train applied the brakes in time…
Metro officials have already begun a review of the automated control systems on the stretch of track where the crash occurred and have found “anomalies.” While such measures are essential, Lee said, making automated systems safer leads to a paradox at the heart of all human-machine interactions: “The better you make the automation, the more difficult it is to guard against these catastrophic failures in the future, because the automation becomes more and more powerful, and you rely on it more and more.”
While it may be tempting to blame this tragedy on hi-tech automation, early reports seem to indicate the track signaling system failed to detect a train in a block. This signaling system is relied upon whether or not the train is in automatic or manual mode.
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