It’ s been a rough year so far for train-related deaths in the Northeast. There were the two teenage girls killed by an Acela train near Philadelphia — both teens jumped on the tracks in an apparent suicide. This week saw two more deaths in New Jersey, with both victims being struck and killed by separate trains — the first was Amtrak’s Keystone 642, which hit someone in Mercer County near the Hamilton Township station, while the second was a New Jersey Transit commuter train that killed a man near the East Orange station. Yesterday, Manhattanites were shocked to hear that a 48-year-old woman had been crushed by a 6 train on the Upper East Side after jumping on the tracks to retrieve her gym bag. To make matters worse, at the time the police were already investigating the death of a 50-year-old man who was hit and killed by a train in Brooklyn.

There will likely be repercussions from this string of deaths — lawsuits, claims of negligence, jobs potentially lost, safety review boards created. But while the sudden string of well-publicized deaths might spur some backlash, it’s tough to argue that much more could be done to keep incidents like this from happening. For starters, there’s the fact that many train-related deaths — like those of the teen girls in Pennsylvania — are suicides. According to a recent study, around 300 to 500 people per year die by deliberately jumping in front of trains.

So can measures be taken to prevent these suicides? There’s the option of erecting barriers, or other physical deterrents — though the counterargument to that is that someone who wants to end his or her life won’t be stopped by a barrier along the train tracks. Still, the Boston Globe reports that there’s “significant evidence that taking away or obstructing the means for people to kill themselves can defuse self-destructive impulses, which often occur in moments of extreme anguish or stress.”

Unfortunately, even if some highly-populated regions decided to erect barricades around the tracks, there’s virtually no way it could be done along all of the 215,000 miles of train track in the U.S. Meaning that all a suicidal person would need to do would be to head to a portion of the track that had no barrier. Some advocates are suggesting testing barriers in locations where they could be most effective — presumably, the most highly-populated areas like the Northeast. Other measures are being tried: Sign campaigns have been sprouting up at commuter rail stations, including notices listing a toll-free suicide hotline, but so far their effectiveness has not been studied.

Still, the sad reality remains that for those seeking to end their lives, trains are an option. Though despite the recent spate of deaths, accidental or no, lets not forget that train fatalities still don’t hold a candle to cars.