I'm surprised how many people are calling this "beautiful" and getting all misty eyed, this feels like an inelegant solution.
I would love to be wrong and hear that someone did the math and found that stopping the train wasn't any more wasteful than just sending this girl a taxi or something, but I have some doubts.
I am unfamiliar with trains, but seeing how cars are tuning themselves off at stop lights now to conserve energy and avoid pollution it really sounds very wasteful stop a whole train for one person. I have to assume that it requires a lot of energy to slow and accelerate a train weighing in at least the tens and likely the hundreds of tons.
It's a sweet idea, but it really does feel misguided to me.
It is an inelegant solution. It's not something you want to scale up. It's not something "right" by Kant's categorical imperative. The lesson to take from this story isn't "keep every train running, no matter how little economical sense it makes it". Such an attitude, universalized, would indeed be a disaster for the world.
No, the lesson is that when running and optimizing systems, we should not forget why are we having them in the first place. They are there for us. Our willingness to make an occasional exception to cater for another human in need, at the cost of efficiency, is what makes us human.
Think of all those tourists who regularly get injured or lost in the mountains and have to be rescued by helicopter S&R teams. From purely economical perspective, this is burning money. We should leave them to die, because the costs of fueling a chopper and risking its destruction, not to mention lives of highly-trained personnel, are great and the money could be better spent elsewhere. And yet we train S&R teams and fly the choppers, because we chose to. Ruthless economic efficiency is not the end goal.
My entire opposition to this is based on the idea that slowing an accelerating a train is grossly more inefficient in terms of pollution and fuel waste than just finding a way to get her to the next station on a transport that does not weigh as much. If I'm wrong about that I'm happy to go back to feeling nice about this.
I'm surprised how many people are calling this "beautiful" and getting all misty eyed, this feels like an inelegant solution.
I would love to be wrong and hear that someone did the math and found that stopping the train wasn't any more wasteful than just sending this girl a taxi or something, but I have some doubts.
I am unfamiliar with trains, but seeing how cars are tuning themselves off at stop lights now to conserve energy and avoid pollution it really sounds very wasteful stop a whole train for one person. I have to assume that it requires a lot of energy to slow and accelerate a train weighing in at least the tens and likely the hundreds of tons.
It's a sweet idea, but it really does feel misguided to me.