This event was pretty chilling for me because I just took the Renfe line from Seville to Madrid a couple of weeks ago while visiting Spain. I generally like to think that I have a pretty good instinct on relative risks and make reasonable decisions based on that. This time around, between the incident earlier this year and this most recent incident, depending on how you interpret and apply the statistics (of course that's always up for healthy debate), it looks like it would have actually been safer driving between Seville and Madrid. That's a pretty low bar in terms of safety!

I set my favorite agent on the task (Opus 5.5 in the Kagi Assistant), and given the two rail crashes in Spain this year, these are the stats it came up with for "chances of dying" via various modes of transportation between Seville and Madrid:

* EU high-speed rail, long-run average: ~1 in 36 million

* This rail line, counting both 2026 crashes: ~1 in 400,000 to 1.2 million (prior to the most recent crash it was 1–3 million; now ~2.5× higher)

* Flying with a European airline: ~1 in 80 million

* Driving: ~1 in 1 million or worse

Of course this is hindsight. Heightened awareness of risks, higher propensity to overreact to anomalies or alarms, procedural changes, and so forth in the wake of this second crash might push high-speed rail in Spain to be higher than the European average in the future.

Ask it to look for high-speed train crashes globally over the past 15 years (to include the 2013 one in Spain as well) to be honest I don’t remember any HS accidents other than the three in Spain so, odds or not, I am NOT taking a high speed train in Spain ever.