You can't be honestly claiming that the people exercised poor judgement when their freedom of action is constrained by the fact that they are hemmed in by all manner of rules in a highly rule following culture and that that poor judgement is justification for further reduced autonomy?

They ("ze germans" broadly speaking) should've handed this 300yr ago by not heading down a path (in their defense it probably wasn't obvious) to a culture that create obvious failures by following rules to the point of absurdity.

The train is just an example, and unfortunately there's no control train. If not the train then the absurd and trivially avoidable failure will be something else.