The last thing I would want to do is to seem to trivialize the particulars of these particular cases, but I don't think it is improper to point to another aspect of the story. That is: how rarely people find themselves in the path of oncoming subway trains.
Forget about the intentional cases (although strictly speaking, I don't know for a fact that either of the cases noted here was intentional). Forget about intentional and concentrate on the thousands of people who rush, push, jostle, their way up and down the subway platforms every hour of every day. And access to the tracks is virtually unlimited. Only in the rarest cases (e.g., Times Square shuttle) is there any barrier to stand between the passenger and the yawning chasm below.
One can imagine a thousand things that might go wrong. A sudden conflict; an accidental shove; an idle misstep. Yet it almost never happens.
I'm sure others (particularly the liability lawyers) have studied this, written about this, before, although I haven't noticed. But notice or not, it is surely a miracle--and pretty good evidence fot the proposition that people are pretty careful about watching out for their own interests (and even those of others) when they know it really matters. Cf,
They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.
--Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, the last sentence.
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