The claim that most people hit by cars were in the street?

My claims are self-evident. Anyone with any common sense can tell this is just a description of reality.

Cars don't just appear out of nowhere. They are for the most part highly predictable.

I should add the caveat that I am specifically talking about Western countries where traffic is quite orderly. In Thailand we had to cross multi-lane roads by just walking into traffic while traffic weaved around us, they wouldn't stop for us even at crossings unless there were lights. In this situation you don't have much of a choice. Here in Norway, cars will stop for you so there is no need to walk out until you are sure the car is stopping. Some times if I'm crossing a multi-lane road I'll walk across one lane then stop and make sure the car coming in the next lane is also stopping for me. Some times they don't. I look both ways even on one way streets.

I've had many situations where drivers clearly don't notice me, and since I didn't walk in front of them I'm fine. Also had a few situations where someone I'm with walks out and I pull them back just in time to watch a car/bus pass right in front of them.

There is no doubt whatsoever that trains are far safer than cars. But often that fact is used as an excuse to not invest in safety. "We don't need to do anything to make thing X safer, because look at that other thing Y that people do which is way more dangerous." (I assume you didn't mean it that way, but some people really do make this argument.)

Human lives matter in absolute numbers, and we should strive to increase safety wherever possible with reasonable effort. Railways in some countries still have some very low-hanging fruit!

The aviation industry has shown that safety as the number one priority does not have to be prohibitively expensive. Layers of redundancy, excellent training, and very good investigations and changes based on their recommendations are what keeps the flying public safe.

Accidents still happen in aviation, but we're at a point of diminishing returns where increasing safety is getting quite difficult. When an aircrew encounters a problem, they can't just stop the plane mid-air to figure things out. The plane has to land, no matter what. That is inherently more risky.

Contrast that with a train, which can more or less just stop wherever it is when something goes wrong. This allows for building a lot of fail-safe/passively safe systems. When there's a problem, just halt operations and take your time to figure things out. Good procedures and adherence to them are still absolutely necessary, but at least there's usually no actual time pressure (only perceived) and malfunctions rarely pose an actual risk if handled correctly.

What aviation has also shown us is that accident investigations need to be 100% honest about underlying causes. "This guy made a mistake, too bad" is never ever an acceptable reason. We have to dig deeper.

People will always make mistakes. But how was such a simple mistake allowed to have such dire consequences? Were there not enough layers of redundancy? Was the training inadequate? Were the rules and procedures inadequate, underspecified, or unclear? Was there a company culture of bending the rules to get the job done? Was there a general lack of safety culture and incident management? Etc.pp.

> All the rules you spoke of by the way were already in-place

I had guessed that was the case, but didn't want to state it definitively, as I'm not familiar with the rules in Spain specifically. But that then raises the question of why the rules weren't followed.

> the rail operator instructed to continue at normal speed. When the train driver asked 'at normal speed?' the operator confirmed

As I explained earlier, "there's been a misunderstanding" is not good enough, I'm sure the report will dig deep to find the underlying causes and will issue plenty of recommendations to prevent this in the future.

I will refrain from speculating on what those causes are though, as there are far too many possibilities. But it's almost certainly a combination of multiple unfortunate factors that led to this horrible accident.

Guys, let's not turn everything into a trains vs cars debate. Obviously, trains are much safer.

But the argument that the relative risk of trains is far lower is, unfortunately, often used as an excuse to not take safety in absolute terms seriously. It's almost like saying: "Because trains are already so much safer than cars, the few crashes that still happen are just bound to happen, they're a fact of life we have to accept, and not worth doing anything about." (I am exaggerating, of course.)

But many of these accidents are in fact easy to prevent, even without huge investment in new infrastructure. So we should prioritize that and make our voices heard that we care about railway safety! And no, this is not a psyop to make people drive their cars more, that would be ridiculous.