Except rail lines aren’t protected, and couldn’t feasibly be protected. An autonomous car could easily be protected from this simply by using local sensors for collision avoidance, which I think is the norm, as opposed to what this headline misleadingly (heh) suggests.

Edit: Relevant XKCD. Causing crashes isn’t hard period. https://m.xkcd.com/1958/

In the UK railways are mostly protected. Now, that may be a simple fence, which someone could climb over, but then they may find themselves reported, or caught on CCTV. It's a very obvious, very visible thing to do, and in urban areas railways are indeed protected pretty well. And remote triggering something like that is non-trivial.

Roads are everywhere, most of them completely unprotected, and you don't actually have to physically and visibly interfere with the road.

> In the UK railways are mostly protected.

They aren't protected. We know this from the numbers of deaths that occur each year on the railways.

Is it also easier to protect all train lines in the country? It seems a bit foolish to compare a single train line to all roads instead of all train lines to all roads.

A more generous interpretation of my comment would have been "all trainlines versus all roads".

In the UK there's an order of magnitude more roads than railways. In the US there are two orders of magnitude more.

Should I also interpret this generously and assume that you only counted roads and train lines with the same amount of people traveling on them?