Rutte wekt irritatie

Wat is uw bezwaar?
“Vooral het hbo is de laatste tijd negatief in het nieuws. Als er sprake is van incidenten, zoals bij de Hogeschool Inholland, dan wordt vaak de indruk gewekt alsof het hele hbo niet deugt. En dat klopt niet. Hoe kan het anders dat accreditatieorganisatie NVAO zo weinig opleidingen afkeurt? Zit er soms een weeffout in de kwaliteitsbewaking? Dan had Rutte die moeten herstellen toen hij daartoe de kans had als staatssecretaris. ‘Onvoldoende’ vind ik een kwalificatie van het hoger onderwijs die de plank volkomen misslaat.”

Maar bij uw eigen hogeschool, die hoog scoort in de ranglijstjes, gaat de lat de komende tijd flink omhoog.
“Dat klopt, want ook al is de basiskwaliteit in orde, het hbo kan altijd beter. Studenten geven zelf aan dat ze meer willen worden uitgedaagd. Daarom gaat de norm voor het bindende studieadvies bij Avans omhoog naar 52 van de zestig studiepunten, kiezen alle studenten straks een vreemde taal op hbo-niveau en krijgen ze extra lessen in onderzoeksvaardigheden en ondernemerschap. Bovendien kan er straks geen enkele opleiding meer worden afgerond als er voor het afstudeerwerk geen praktijkgericht onderzoek is verricht. Studenten die voor Avans kiezen weten dat er zware eisen aan hen worden gesteld.”

Dus als premier Rutte had gezegd dat de lat in het hoger onderwijs omhoog moet, had u daarmee geen probleem gehad?
“Dat klopt. Maar nu doet hij 95 procent van de hbo-studenten, de afgestudeerden en de medewerkers van hogescholen onrecht.”

The most probable cause of the accident is that one of the trains missed a stop signal. Belgium’s rail operator, Infrabel, has launched an investigation.
Safety expert, professor Ben Ale (faculty of Technology, Policy and Management), is very curious to see the outcome. “This accident raises a lot of questions”, he says. “An old passenger train probably missed a stop signal and was hit in the side by another, more modern train. What I noticed when I looked at pictures from the accident scene taken from above is that the old train would have hit a freight train a bit further down the track, if it hadn’t been hit first by this other commuter train. It’s strange that the track operator allowed such a precarious situation to occur.”
In Belgium there is much indignation over the fact that not all trains are equipped with the Crocodil safety system, which automatically stops trains that miss stop signals.

“It’s possible that the train that caused the accident didn’t have this system”, Ale says. “After an accident in Belgium in 2001, in which eight people were killed, the government decided to install this safety system in all trains, starting with the most modern trains. The aim was to have the system on all trains by 2009, but recently they were talking about by 2013. Maybe now they will speed up the installation – I don’t know.”
But even with Crocodil on board, the accident might not have been prevented. Ale: “Crocodil only stops a train that misses a stop if the train is traveling faster than forty kilometers per hour. It’s not clear yet how fast this train was going.”
The Belgium system is almost identical to the Dutch safety system, ATB. According to Ale, accidents like this disaster in Belgium can therefore also occur in Holland.

ATB also only reacts at speeds higher than forty kilometers per hour. The Dutch government had this system installed in the early 1960s, following the country’s biggest train disaster, an accident at Harmelen in 1962 that killed 91 people.
The reason for this ‘speed flaw’ in the system is that when the system was developed in the 1960s, trains that were in stations and had to be moved around (shunted) from one track to another or coupled to another train were also susceptible to the system. If it weren’t for the minimum speed level installed, ATB would automatically stop every train in the station, because there would always be a stop signal given somewhere in the station.
Now of course with more advanced systems and faster computers, it is possible to avoid these problems and install safety system that work perfectly at every speed. The European ERTMS system is one such example.
Why isn’t Holland replacing ATB with ERTMS? “It would cost about one billion euro to do so”, Ale says. “Put very cynically, the question is: do you want to spend that amount of money to spare four lives a year? If you take into account the accident at Harmelen and the casualties thereafter, and divide this by fifty, then that is about the yearly death toll among train passengers in the Netherlands.”