[joshvm]

Rail systems aren't really comparable because, well, they're on rails. You have five more degrees of freedom when flying an aircraft.

A train driver's main job is to have good reflexes. Aside from opening the doors in case of fire, I can't think of a railway accident that couldn't have been prevented by simply stopping the train(s) in time. A driverless train simply needs an emergency stop button and a way for passengers to get out in an emergency.

[fulafel]

You can reduce most things to not stopping when you should, but... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_train_disaste...

[joshvm]

In that particular case there were faulty brakes on one of the cars. Had they been working (or the fault communicated properly) and the train not been overloaded, the derailment would likely not have happened. There was no other alternative - if no braking had happened, the disaster would almost certainly have been worse.

In a computerised system, the brakes would most likely have fault reporting. Actually in this case they did - the logs indicated that the dynamic braking system wasn't producing any current. This should have been indicated to the driver.

There's also plenty of human error there in not reporting the brake failure and 'eyeballing' weights. Passenger trains are presumably designed such that even with severe overcrowding and lots of luggage there is small chance of the brakes being underpowered. I have no idea why an emergency brake system wouldn't activate all possible means to slow things down.

I agree that in this instance braking actually worsened the problem, but the solution was still that the train should have been braked properly. A computerised system would likely have performed similar steps although it would know the braking force provided by each technique and respond accordingly.