crossposted from: https://feddit.it/post/29954054
Source and additional pics:
https://beige.party/@Lana/116684403003398772
Also from the same thread:
For people who aren’t intimately knowledgeable about the Seattle rail system, the Mt Baker station is an elevated platform. Meaning she had to have driven the WRONG WAY on a railroad about 40 feet up in the air for SEVERAL MILES to end up here.
Edit: it looks like it was not “several miles” but less then one mile; a notable feat anyway:
The excuse that the GPS led them there is so ridiculous. Even if it did, you should absolutely have the awareness to determine that you can’t drive on railway tracks and override that decision.
Drivers need to be held more accountable for the moronic things they do. You make mistakes with gigantic machines and people get hurt or die. It’s not a, “whoops.”
“So anyway, chatgpt said…”
Cognitive surrender has been here all along, but it is about to get a lot worse.
“I don’t need to know things because Google/ChatGPT knows things for me.”
“Those DO NOT ENTER signs must be wrong. GPS said to turn here!”
The navigation on the new model of “Wet Nellie” must have switched to transit directions, after pressing the wrong mode change button.
Its not several miles, but it was at least a quarter mile. The station is elevated, but about a quarter mile away the tracks are level with the road. They are up a large curb, there is “no car” signage and you have to literally drive off a road, over a gap and onto train tracks, but its not miles away. You can almost see the station from the place she likely entered:
There apparently is video footage from the transit system, but it wasent been released yet so we don’t know where she entered the tracks yet.
Seattle’s local satire site “theneedling” hitting all the right notes as usual:
“I’m sick and tired of all these pro-trains urbanistas like Katie Wilson blocking me from driving our cars over anything we want, be it train tracks or a Pike Place Market full of little children who actually love almost getting sucked under passing SUVs.”
Oh my god, it reads just like so many people on Nextdoor.
They are absolutely in their element with this one. Another great blitzkrieg on it :
Great additional info, thanks!
Seeing the pic of it makes it a microscopic iota easier to understand how the mistake happened, but very clearly any person who’s capable of driving shouldn’t ever make that mistake. And even if a person accidentally started turning on to the tracks, any mentally capable driver would’ve immediately recognized that it was totally wrong and backed out of it.
Can you imagine how terribly wrong the car motion would’ve felt as soon as the metal tracks rose above the road surface?
The driver is 70 years old. I suspect that was a factor in the mistake.
Seems very plausible. IMO a drivers license should have mandatory retesting every 10 years. And the driving test should be much more thorough
My instinct says stay alive but the GPS says keep going straight.
My radio plays staying alive and my GPS is doing the thing with the colorful lines on the GTA map
“Several miles” is incorrect. Measuring on Google Earth says 500m, or 0.3 miles.
Still a fuckup but much less impressiveI think what’s most concerning is that it’s an elevated station. How do you leave the surface and not notice?
I mean, to be fair, once you’ve left the surface you can’t exactly get off the rails.
Yeah maybe they just like, got stuck. Can’t really turn around either.
I imagine that is what happened. Fear of reversing can make somebody plunge further ahead with some hope they could get out of it at a lower point with no repercussions? Still the wrong move but people be dumb
She was also driving north on the southbound tracks. After that station, you head into a long underground tunnel as the train passes through the downtown.
Hope might spring eternal, but every bit going forward was actually more dangerous than the bit before for her and the thousand people on each train.
This is probably very dangerous, but also hilarious.
So she drove her card on a very small set of rails for several miles? And she only slipped from the rails when she entered the station? That’s actually an impressive driving feat.
Can’t park there, mate.
All we had to do was follow the damn train, CJ
Left this post and came back to comment because I appreciate good nostalgia.
Nobody ever gets these references. Goated.
hey its me playing gta 3
People are saying she was following google maps but had it set to transit instead of driving by mistake
I’d say this is some uniquely stupid thing, but apparently when Google maps was new people used to follow it into Lake Washington.
She’s seventy years old. She needs a cognitive assessment.
That’s the new CRT, Car Rapid Transit. In the future they might link it with several car.
Hook them up in a chain. Like a… transit-chain
Like a trucker convoy, but on rails?
My god… Someone call the patent office!
10 years ago, I had a friend unironically describe to me how self driving cars would solve traffic jams by communicating and coordinating with each other to drive at high speed, in a line, close to each other, with just inches between each car…
“bro… you just invented a really shitty, inefficient train…”
This is what you get when you build light rail at street level without adequate crossing barriers.
Seattle’s Link light rail was built through the city’s south side through the middle of Martin Luther King Junior Way South (“MLK”) with street level crossings for cars and pedestrians, for miles and miles, without any physical barriers like bollards or traditional railroad crossing gates, just flashing lights. Trains are hitting cars all the time here, and it’s incredibly easy for a car to drive right onto the tracks.
There has long been a need for a major safety improvement project to correct this, but Sound Transit is having major project funding problems lately regarding a new line being built, so we’re basically stuck with this problem for at least 20 more years.
Update: Including a photo from the original thread. This is where the driver drove up. The photos from the original post were taken at the light rail station, which is up the rail ramp in this photo and to the left.
You can see concrete curbs here separating the at-grade rail from the street (which are easy enough to drive over), but even those curbs disappear at street crossings.
We could just have higher standards for drivers…
While this person probably needs their license taken away, blaming drivers for unsafe infrastructure is not the answer.
Well, the drivers are by-and-large the ones who opposed properly funding the light rail’s initial construction, so I do still blame them.
When the infrastructure is only unsafe because the driver is a fucking moron it is.
The infrastructure should be better, but this is a really difficult mistake to make if you’re fit to drive
… man there’s no way you drive for long enough to get up that ramp without realizing ‘none of this sounds, feels, or looks right’.
Seems much more like a critical lack of awareness.
We can also remove their license and implement stricter requirements. If they can’t drive it’s fine, we have a rail to ride to work!
Not sure if “this is what you get”, something like this doesnt happen very often.
I’m waiting for them to say “Google maps told me to.”
Hold up. This is in SEATTLE?! How did they even get the car to the track? This is like getting a car onto a subway track.
Edit: ahhh. In other pictures, it’s down south where the track gets to ground level. Also, utah plates.
in gta?
