Disclaimer: I&#x27;ve worked on automated transportation systems and have worked on SIL-4, realtime&#x2F;safety-critical systems for the trains systems of Europe and most of the western world.<p>Germany has one of the best rail transportation infrastructures in the world.  You can travel around the German state on trains in a single day, in much comfort, and hundreds of thousands of people are delivered to their destinations with safety and security, every single hour.<p>What they also have, is complacency and decadence, and you could say a lot about how the bureaucracy of companies such as Siemens and Thales allows this decadence to flow throughout the infrastructure.<p>Accidents like this happen today because of human error, through and through.  No matter how much we automate safety, in the end it depends on having a conscious human watching the systems and ensuring that things stay, literally, on the rails.  It is far too soon to try to understand what went wrong in this case - but I can only say that the fact that an accident occurred, in spite of the extremely impressive infrastructure put in place to keep it safe, means simply: someone screwed up.