Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin assured Muscovites on Sunday that the metro continued to be the city's safest form of transportation despite last week's fatal crash.
"The metro is the safest form of transportation. That is obvious. If we take the safety of above-ground transportation, personal vehicles in which millions get around, that is a thousand times more dangerous. As for air transportation or railway transportation, all statistics show that it is more dangerous," Sobyanin said during an interview with state-run television channel Rossia 1 on Sunday.
Sobyanin then took it a step further by saying Moscow's underground transportation system is safer than those of Paris, New York and other large cities.
Last Tuesday's crash, which occurred during the early morning rush hour, was the deadliest in the metro's 79-year history. Three metro cars going 70 kilometers per hour jumped the rails between the Slavyansky Bulvar and Park Pobedy stations on the Dark Blue Line. Twenty-three people were killed in the accident and more than 160 injured.
Of the injured, 126 remain hospitalized, Interfax reported on Sunday. Five are still listed as in critical condition. Another 19 are in intensive care. Among the others, 10 are listed as in serious condition, 36 in moderately serious condition, and 66 in satisfactory condition. Since the disaster, 21 people have been discharged from hospitals.
"I will say it again, this tragedy is simply unprecedented, and it hurts me greatly … that it happened not because of some complicated, systemic error in the engineering, but in my opinion from a lack of discipline and complacency by individual workers … But we need to continue to live, to work and to make decisions to fix this," Sobyanin said in the interview.
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