Comment by embedding-shape
1 day ago
> I’d say it’s mostly a North-European thing,
I think it's a "busy tracks" problem in general, which yeah, is a problem in Europe in general. You can't just stop a train in the middle of some track, there are a bunch of other trains coming too, who can't just pass unless you get to a place where that is possible, which isn't everywhere.
None the less, the rest of what you say is true of Sweden, but I don't think it's the reason a train refuses to stop on some train tracks.
My point is that, in a country where people act like well, people (and not robots), someone would be bothered by this and might try to solve the problem in some creative and unexpected way. Someone might think "damn, we're ruining these peoples' christmas, let's do something" and then fix it somehow. Here it's more like "well bummer, deal with it" in both cases. I doubt that a bunch of adult, highly-skilled people could not have a conversation over the phone and arrange for a train to stop 5 minutes on a track so people could get off. Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident? I think that a lack of willingness to give a fuck is much more likely.
> Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident?
No, but these places generally prefer to take care of the collective, even if it means slightly worse conditions for some individuals. This is impregnated into our brains from early on, and somewhat humorously "codified" in the Law of Jante, among others. From the outside, for the last two decades, it seems to be slightly changing more and more into another direction, but that's how it was when I was born and raised there at least.
Once you understand the common perspective of "sacrificing the individual for the group", it becomes a lot easier to understand this sort of reasoning.
Personally, I don't agree with it, together with a bunch of other weird social rules, hence I don't live there anymore. But the other side of the fence, where every rule is constantly broken by everyone, "just in this case" but 100x times a week, isn't so much better after all. Just different. Some people seem to be wired for some things, others not so much.