Passengers are legally required to wear a seat belt in a car and holidaymakers jetting off on a plane have to wear one when instructed, too.
Coaches have seat belts, as do mini buses, and the safety strap has been praised for saving countless lives in collisions.
But one mode of transport where seat belts aren’t found is on the train.
It might be surprising, as the maximum train speed in the UK is 186mph, which is reached by Eurostar trains on the HS1 line.
Elsewhere in the country, trains are capped at 125mph.
Despite travelling faster than cars and coaches, there is not a seat belt in sight on board a typical train.
Transportation safety expert Thomas Barth revealed to Reader’s Digest why this is the case.
‘The basic answer is that they don’t need seat belts in all but very rare occurrences,’ he told the publication.
One mode of transport where seat belts aren’t found is on the train (stock)
The former survival factors investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board explained that the risks are lower on trains.
‘Controlled environments’ that trains operate in, with professionals overseeing things and running on a track are safer than where cars and planes might run.
He explained: ‘The environment is so safe that the risk has been considered reasonable without the inconvenience of seat belts.’
The impact of a collision is considered too, and a train performs very differently to a car in a crash.
When a car stops quickly, as it collides into a wall, it has ‘very high crash forces’, according to Thomas.
Meanwhile, a train’s impact differs because of its heavy weight and size.
‘It’s very large and heavy, with very low crash forces when hitting relatively light objects,’ Thomas added.
However in the case of a head-on collision between two trains, high crash force would be cased, but this is rare.
Transportation safety expert Thomas Barth revealed why this is the case (stock)
Overall, collisions involving trains are relatively rare in comparison to cars and other vehicles.
According to the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB), train travel is more than 20 times safer than travelling by car for the same journey length.
Compared to travelling in the air, the statistics are interesting. There are around 20 deaths per billion train journeys, The Telegraph reports, and 117 per billion air journeys.
However, there are 0.6 deaths per billion kilometres travelled by train, compared to 0.5 deaths by air travel.
Share or comment on this article:
Revealed: The reason why trains don’t have seat belts
Source link
CHECK OUT: Top Travel Destinations
READ MORE: Travel News
