red line

When I was in D.C. for the Inauguration, I took the Metro Red Line every day to the Capitol area. I was staying with a former editor in Maryland, and he and his wife live near the last Red Line stop. It was total chaos during the Inauguration, but I appreciated the convenience of having mass transit nearby.
I was worried when I heard about the crash. He said in an email response that, of course, he was nowhere ready to come home from his editing job at McClatchy around rush hour, but a neighbor two doors down was in the crash and was interviewed on television, and that his wife had checked on her. She's okay.
I thought the Metro seemed very modern and safe compared to the New York subways when I lived there. Obviously, there is something to be said for human hands at the controls.
Here in the Columbia Gorge, we have no mass transit. If we crash, it's our fault, a deer crossing the road, or someone crossing the centerline. Which is worse --- a computer failure or a damn deer? Encounters with deer have happened to me twice, totaling my pickup once. I sat in a lot of stopped underground trains while I was in New York, but most of the time I never knew what had happened. Once, coming home from a gig in the middle of the night, we serenaded the other passengers stuck in the dark in a tunnel. We could because we had acoustic instruments. They applauded in the dark.
Thank you very much.