It's also pretty common in the UK for trains to be delayed just because some passenger accidentally left their bag on the platform. Not even any malicious intent. I was on a train that stopped in a tunnel for that reason once. They're just very vulnerable to any hint of danger.
You don't need anything for anything. You can do war with long sticks. Turns out guns, planes, and firebombs work better.
It is, and it will increase as it becomes more accessible.
> This is the first case I've even heard of.
That's because you're both not paying much attention and this is under-reported.
I would wager maybe a quarter of all content on the internet is bot generated. I'm not the first to propose this.
> Seems like you're already proven wrong, unless you're counting on some future change that isn't here yet?
I kind of am, notably AI both becoming better and more accessible. You're right, it might not.
Most economic value arises from distinguishing signal from noise. All of science is distinguishing signal from noise.
Its valuable, because it is hard. It is also slow - the only way to verify something is often to have reports from someone who IS there.
The conflict arises not from verifying the easy things - searching under the illumination of street lights. Its verifying if you have a weird disease, or if people are alive in a disaster, or what is actually going on in a distant zone.
Verification is laborious. In essence, the universe is not going to open up its secrets to us, unless the effort is put in.
Content generation on the other hand, is story telling. It serves other utility functions to consumers - fulfilling emotional needs for example.
As the ratio of content to information keeps growing, or the ratio of content to verification capacity grows - we will grow increasingly overwhelmed by the situation.
Main point is that there aren't technical difficulties in verifying the state of main infrastructure in real time (contrary to the claim of the commenter I was initially replying to), and it's more a question of priority and will than doability or cost.
It will happen but the usual way is that "it's not possible", "it's too expensive", etc until something bad enough happens and then suddenly it is doable and done.
Where I live it is not uncommon for rail to have detection for people walking on the rail, and bridges to have extra protection against jumpers. I wouldn't be that surprised if the same system can be used to verify damage.
Ultimately, though, this kind of stuff is expensive (semi-bespoke safety-critical equipment every few miles across an enormous network) and doesn't reduce all risks. Landslides don't necessarily break rails (but can cause derailments), embankments and bridges can get washed out but the track remains hanging, and lots of other failure modes.
There are definitely also systems to confirm that the power lines aren't down, but unfortunately the wires can stay up and the track be damaged or vice versa, so proving one doesn't prove the other. CCTV is probably a better bet, but that's still a truly enormous number of cameras, plus running power supplies all along the railway and ensuring a data link, plus monitoring.
CCTV cameras are mostly in private ownership, those in public ownership are owned by a mass of radically different bodies who will not share access without a minimum of police involvement. Oh and of course - we rarely point the cameras at the bridges (we have so many bridges).
> Where I live it is not uncommon for rail to have detection for people walking on the rail, and bridges to have extra protection against jumpers. I wouldn't be that surprised if the same system can be used to verify damage.
This bridge just carries trains. There is no path for walking on it. Additionally jumping would be very unusual on this kind of bridge; the big suspension bridges attract that behaviour.
You mentioned twice that you are surprised by things which are quite common in the UK. I don't know where you're from, but it's worth noting that the UK has long been used as a bogeyman by American media, and this has intensified recently. You should come and visit, the pound is not so strong at the moment so you'll get a great deal to see our country.
Here in Sweden, people walking on the rails without permission is a fairly common problem, which cause almost 4k hours of accumulated delays per year. For people who often travel by train, the announcement of reduced speed because of the system has detected people on the tracks are one of the more common ones, only second to the catch-all announcement of "signal error", which simply mean the computer says stop for a reason that the driver don't know or don't want to say.
When it comes to suicide prevention on bridges, it is not just the big bridges. Suicide by train is a fairly talked methods in the news as a work hazard for train drivers, and the protection here is for small bridges that goes above the track. Similar issues exist with bridges over roads and highways. Those methods are to my read of the statistics more common than the movie version of a person jumping from a suspension bridge.
We had a big government inquest into suicide in 2018 which included asking national rail to justify it position and actions. Of the 30k rail bridges in the UK only the hotspots have any modern measures of suicide prevention; and the hotspots are mostly but not exclusively suspension bridges.
However, from your comment, I see that you might be meaning pedestrian bridges across tracks, which almost always have metal rails higher than an adult man here. Our older stone road bridges (which are very common) have thick and tall walls on the edge which serve a similar function if not as effectively.
However, I think to hark back to the original image and post - the bridge depicted is a train bridge going over a road. More like a viaduct tbh. Its highly unlikely that there is any normalised pedestrian access so it won't tank highly for assigning prevention and detection measures for either suicid, and its easily assessed from the busy public road so I doubt it makes the priority list for automated collapse detection.
Take a fast moving wildfire with one of the paths of escape blocked. There may be other lines of escape but fake images of one of those open roads showing its blocked by fire could lead to traffic jams and eventual danger on the remaining routes of escape.
Reminds me of the attacker vs defender dilemma in cybersecurity - attackers just need one attack to succeed while a defender must spend resources considering and defending against all the different possibilities.
The rail operator didn't do anything wrong. After an earthquake and a realistic-looking image, the only responsible action is to treat it as potentially real and inspect the track.
This wasn't catastrophic, but it's a preview of a world where a single person can cheaply trigger high-cost responses. The systems we build will have to adapt, not by ignoring social media reports, but by developing faster, more resilient ways to distinguish signal from noise.