Positive-train control is an exercise in futility. Almost 900 people were killed in railroad accidents in 2018, and positive-train control wouldn’t have saved more than, perhaps, ten of them. Yet Congress imposed this multi-billion-dollar cost on the nation’s railroads.
Now the Federal Railroad Administration says that all but eight railroads are in compliance with the law. What does it say that five of those eight are government owned? The Alaska Railroad, New Jersey Transit, New Mexico’s Rail Runner, Chicago’s Metra, and TEXRail all “are at risk of not fully implementing a PTC system” by the latest deadline, which is the end of this year.
The passengers that railroads carry lots are exactly the people that the law was written to protect. Congress wrote the law in response to a 2008 collision between a Los Angeles Metrolink passenger train and a freight train that killed 25 people.
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All of which goes to show just how submarginal passenger trains really are. Agencies such as New Jersey Transit and Metra can’t afford to maintain the infrastructure they have, much less install a whole new layer of infrastructure on top of it. Even TEXRail, which is brand new, couldn’t afford to install positive-train control as it built its line to the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport.
Congress shouldn’t have passed a law that would only save a handful of people and require railroads to divert resources from programs (such as fencing of rights-of-way and better grade crossings) that could have saved far more. But the fact that it did so should transit agencies a wake-up call that they need to seriously consider converting rail transit lines to bus transit that is much safer and doesn’t require exclusive infrastructure.
Of those 900 people killed how many were result of drivers going up to the train tracks
Apparently the Antiplanner doesn’t understand the “Think of the Children” mindset. The Psychological infarction in passing laws that deemed so essential to save lives regardless of how many lives they honestly save.
Mark Twain said so earnestly “There’s two things so disgusting no American should ever witness it….the making of sausage and the making of legislation”
Since transit is viewed by most as an otherwise social good it’s supposedly beneficial environmentally, economically, socially and moral public good, any attempt to decry it, curtail, shut it down is viewed as racist/bigoted/elitist, blah blah blah. No matter How miserable public services get, democrats will win predominantly any major city election.
LazyReader,
How many were killed at grade crossings? Click the first link in the story: about 270. The bulk of deaths are pedestrians walking on rail rights of way.
” to bus transit that is much safer”
That’s absurd and you know it. I think one person died on US airlines last year vs zero on Amtrak. Does that mean Amtrak is much safer then airlines? Of course not. That almost sounds like an argument I had with someone in a pro rail group who was using a bus accident on the Pennsylvania turnpike as proof that buses are dangerous and unreliable. Comparing things that are both near zero is meaningless.
@lazy reader, the singles biggest category for those those 900 that died is probably trespassing. And sadly a large portion within that it likely suicide by train.
As for the PTC, it’s pretty………..welll…. INTERESTING, that all those politicians complaining the last few years about the big bad corporations not implementing PTC are NOT railing against all the agencies who have had even more time and still failed.
At least Metrolink has implemented PTC.
INTERESTING.
More like totally predictable and expected
hahaha… ya, it’s kind sad, eh?