Stupid people and trains

Proving once again, that the stupidity of the traveling public knows no bounds are these two recent stories (from Sydney and Melbourne respectively) of what happens when you fail to treat trains with the respect they deserve. Last Wednesday, an 18-year old man decided that being asked for a valid ticket by a Transit Officer was a direct threat to his personal safety and thus decided to jump into the ‘four foot’ at Town Hall station’s Platform Five. Luckily for our youth, he only lost his thumb and sustained an injury to his arm. Unfortunately, he has lived to tell the tale.
Meanwhile, down at Geelong, a 14-year old girl thought that an express train traveling at 90 km/h was a stopping train when she tried to cross the tracks and jump onto the platform at the city’s North Shore station. In both cases, commuters were inconvenienced by having their trains cancelled in the peaks and train drivers (and in the Victorian case, passengers) were traumatised by the sight of someone going under the wheels of the train.
The Geelong incident provoked much handwringing and soul-searching and calls for the Victorian government to do something about unfenced tracks and eliminate level crossings. Indeed, the Melbourne Age newspaper was kind enough to provide a list of level crossing incidents and fatalities over the last decade, that acts as a catalogue of human stupidity and occasionally, a series of unfortunate events.
Now call me old-fashioned, but both these incidents mentioned above (and many from the list in the Age) seem to stem from the stupid actions of individuals whose selfish personal needs (to escape the TOs, or catch a train) impact on the needs of the many (to go to work or get home). And quite frankly, we need these kind of people out of the gene pool so they can’t breed. Here ends my rant