Transportation Safety

Last week’s commuter train crash in New Jersey has left people wondering how safe our transportation system really is. We can answer this question with data from National Transportation Statistics, which show passenger miles, fatalities, and injuries by mode of transportation since 1990.

The statistics show transit data only through 2012, but the Federal Transit Administration has safety data for the years since then. Unfortunately, the Federal Railroad Administration, not the Federal Transit Administration, monitors commuter rail safety, and it doesn’t seem to publish those numbers, so we only have them through 2012.

As the numbers in the above table show, air travel is by far the safest, followed by bus and heavy rail. Highways are moderately safe. The most dangerous modes are Amtrak, light rail, and commuter rail. These are not, for the most part, dangerous for people on board the trains but for pedestrians and occupants of motor vehicles struck by trains. On average, only about 3 percent of Amtrak fatalities and 5 percent of light- and heavy-rail fatalities are people who were on board the trains. Though close to 20 percent of light- and heavy-rail fatalities are people waiting to board or who have recently alighted from trains, this still means three out of four are people off the trains. The numbers are probably pretty similar for commuter rail.

As noted before, the Antiplanner has disputed a change the Obama administration made to how the DOT calculates highway passenger miles. In the Bureau of Transportation Statistics tables, the average motor vehicle is presumed to have about 1.64 people before 2009, but only 1.44 people since. As the latest National Household Transportation Survey estimated the number is 1.67 (see table 16 on page 23), the older number is more realistic. For the tables today, I used the BTS numbers, but if you agree with me that the recent calculations are wrong, reduce the 2005-2014 numbers by 7 percent.

Making this correction suggests that highway fatality rates actually fell by 31.3 percent since the 1990s. Bus and light-rail fatality rates hardly improved at all, while the heavy-rail rate improved in the 1990s but hasn’t changed much since 2000.
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The highway numbers in table one include all roads, but safety varies quite a bit from one kind of road to another. As shown in the table above, freeways tend to be safest, and urban roads tend to be safer than rural roads. Urban interstates are currently the safest form of motorized ground transportation. Again, reduce the 2005-2014 numbers by 7 percent if you agree that the auto occupancy rates since 2009 are miscalculated.

National Transportation Statistics also present injury data by mode. As shown in table three, the number of injuries on Amtrak is massive. About a third of the injuries on Amtrak happen to passengers. On light rail, about a quarter are passengers and 40 percent are people waiting to get on or who recently got off of trains. For heavy rail, 5 percent are passengers and 90 percent are people on platforms.

The relative standings are about the same as for fatalities except commuter-rail injury rates are lower than for most other forms of ground transportation. In fact, the commuter-rail numbers seem questionably low: while the injury rates for other modes are 80 to 400 times greater than fatality rates, they are only around 20 times greater for commuter rail. Since commuter-rail numbers come from the FRA and other transit numbers come from the FTA, I wonder if there is a difference in methodologies.

In any case, the data show there is a wide disparity in the safety among different modes, and that all modes are getting safer but some are getting safer faster than others. While many people will say that positive train control would make commuter rail and Amtrak safer, in fact the vast majority of fatalities resulting from these modes happen to people off the trains. Since positive train control would not have helped many of those people, it is likely that putting more efforts into improving grade crossings and discouraging pedestrians from wandering on tracks would be more cost-effective in improving the safety records of these modes.