(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]
What railway pedestrian fatalities in Mumbai can teach us about online safety
2024-07-24 08:32:20+00:00
I found a video on TikTok that tipped me off to a series of googleable stories over the past 15 years about reducing pedestrian railway fatalities in India caused by people walking along and over the tracks. In a nutshell:
people can and will walk along and across active railway tracks
they don’t do it with much consideration for their own safety
they will cut-through or climb over walls and fences “for convenience”
they will get hit by trains
The latter is the important one to accept: there’s no way to force fatalities down to zero, so a consulting firm asked instead: “how can we help people understand risk so that fewer people are killed?”
The simple and effective answer is: paint lines on the tracks so that people can judge distance (and hence risk) better, so that they better avoid getting hit. Application of a can of yellow paint reduced fatalities by between 40% and 75%.
The analogy with Social Networking is obvious – but first it requires one to accept that “harms will happen” and that the goal instead is to inform people how to stay safe, rather than to (fail to) wall them off from the risk.
[END]
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