Peter Webster is morally equivalent to Bryan Drysdale. Given that Mr Drysdale killed Mr Webster’s daughter, this is probably not an irony that the latter would relish.
At worst, Mr Drysdale sought to take a trainload of passengers with him while killing himself, by parking his car on a railway line. At best, his disregard for the danger to others while pursuing his aim of killing himself was reckless.
Mr Webster’s disregard for the danger to others while pursuing his own aims is clearly similarly reckless. Should his legal action against the train company who he believes killed his daughter (despite Mr Drysdale’s blatant culpability) succeed, UK train companies would be forced to provide seatbelts.
The direct cost of providing seatbelts would be significant. The indirect cost, however, would be enormous: such a move would mean an end to standing on long-distance trains in the UK – and therefore, an end to the turn-up-and-go system that we currently have, and a dramatic reduction in peak hour capacity. Such a change would significantly reduce the proportion of journeys taken by rail.
Since cars are an order of magnitude more dangerous than trains, this would – very really, very literally – kill people. More people than Mr Drysdale. Hence the moral equivalence.
(BTW, if I ever become deranged enough that I attempt to cause people’s deaths in order to ease my suffering, please can someone shoot me?)
(link via Longrider. See also Safety is Dangerous at the now-sadly-defunct Transport Blog.)
Slightly harsh way of putting it, but your logic is sound.
It’s also supported by statistics – the Hatfield train crash in 2000, which led to a general speed reduction that lasted for months and forced people back onto the road, directly led to a sharp rise in road-related deaths over the same period.
In any case, what would compulsory seatbelts achieve, aside from everything you mention and a significant fare increase both to pay for them and to compensate for the reduced capacity? And has any other country adopted these measures?
I’ve commuted by train for four or five days a week, almost without exception, since 1978 – and since 2001 this includes a daily return trip from the South Coast to London. There has not been one single moment across what must be a minimum of tens of thousands of journeys where I’ve felt genuinely unsafe (*). This is not, to put it mildly, true of road-based journeys – which is why it’s right that seatbelts are compulsory there but not on trains.
(*) at least not through whatever the train was doing: passengers are, of course, a different matter!