Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

jeremyterabyte found a video (Mature content warning!) of the Yishun MRT suicide on 5 December 2006. He emphasises on the need for platform screen doors to prevent people from falling to their deaths.

Update (03 Mar 2007):jeremyterabyte has taken the videos down upon request from the police. He blogs about it in a new post.

Wait a second… fall to their deaths? It didn’t sit quite well with me, but the image of people accidentally dropping onto the tracks when an incoming train enters the station kept popping up. I seriously doubt that people would do that much as to stand so close to the edge of the platform. Idiots proved me wrong.

I see people jostling for the prime space right in front of where the train doors would open even before the train has arrived. If that doesn’t make sense for you, imagine a train already at the station, with its doors open, and alighting passengers cannot exit out of the door because of the human obstacle on the platform actively pushing inwards.

Now, picture the same scenario, without a train. We get an accident waiting to go off like a cocked weapon.

It is stupidity at one of its numerous peaks. In Singapore, our train squeeze is not as bad as in Japan:

As you can see, though there isn’t any sitting room available, there is relatively enough space to be relatively comfortable. Now then, why do people still bully their way into the train?

Selfishness, I guess. I have no idea how many close shaves had happened at the above-ground stations simply because of stupidity alone: but what I know is that people will persist in trying to give themselves an advantage whenever they need to board a train. Whether we should institute any actions to save them from clinching any Darwin award depends on our administrative stance: Do we want to continue being a paternalistic prick, and put everything into the law, should we be maternalistic and build barriers, or should we leave Evolution to do its work?

Now, we add suicidal people into the picture, and the debate takes on a new dimension. Our country criminalises suicide, and by no means impose penalties for deciding to end one’s own life. There are desperate people with their backs to the wall - they feel that they have absolutely nothing to loss by dying, and choose to hurl themselves to the trains. Erecting barriers would only serve to deter these people from dying under the carriage, and instead, they come up with different tactics to complete the act.

I may be skeptical here, but were those people whom were for the building of screen doors thinking about the lives of the desperate, or were they thinking along pragmatic lines of pushing the problem to other places? The after-math of suicides are disruptive to the lives of those present, as well as cost the economy in terms of lost work hours. Keeping these people away from the MRT only serves to postpone the problem to another place, and do not truly solve the problem of suicide.

Barriers are costly, and do not prevent suicides at all. What’s more, they embolden the stupid to crowd even nearer to the doors, since it is even safer than usual, just like it is at the underground stations (where there are platform screen doors). What we need is a system of fines and a curriculum on common sense for Singaporeans to understand anything at all. It is just as my secondary school disciplinary master would say, “First class facilities, third world mentality. People have such thick skulls that their grey matter don’t start working.”

Filed under: General