Washington subway crash

[glatt]

I found an official aerial map of the sight distances, similar to the one I whipped together in the days after the accident on Google Earth, looking for answers that nobody was providing.

So of course, I had to see how close I was in my armchair analysis.

I wrote that:

Originally Posted by glatt

If you go to Google Earth and look at the accident scene, you can measure from the point of impact back in a straight line until that straight line gets obstructed by something, and then you know how far away the driver should have been able to see the stopped train. When you do this, you will see that the accident happened at a curve, under a bridge, and the visibility was actually pretty bad. The driver, if she had been paying 100% attention to the track in front of her, would have first seen the corner of the stopped train when she was about 355 meters away. At that particular location, according to the Washington Post, the train speed limit is 59 miles per hour. A train traveling at 59 miles per hour will cover 355 meters in 13.5 second. She wouldn't have seen the full train until she was about 160 meters away or 6 seconds from impact.

According to the official map, drawn by people on the ground with survey equipment, the stopped train was partially visible at a distance of 1,118.2 feet (or 340.8 meters.) I said it was partially visible at 355 meters. The official report said the train was fully visible at a distance of 471.0 feet (or 143.5 meters.) I said it was fully visible at 160 meters.

I had been measuring from the position of the crashed trains, and it turns out the stopped train was pushed down the track about 3-4 meters by the impact, and I hadn't accounted for that. So my calculations were pretty damn close. Much closer than I expected.