Two people died last week when their car was struck by a Brightline train in Aventura, Florida. That made a total of five fatalities to Brightline trains in December alone. Railroad officials were quick to blame the latest accident on the auto driver, who drove “around the gates, which were down, flashing and bells ringing, signaling an approaching train.”
Google street view at or near the location where two people were killed in their car last week while trying to cross Brightline tracks. Not only do the crossing gates not cover the entire width of the road, there are no fences to keep pedestrians off the rail right of way.
“Americans are morons,” a railroad conductor commented on a Jalopnik article about the accident. But who is the moron: the person who drove around the crossing gates or the person who decided to run 79-mph passenger trains on tracks whose crossing gates had been installed when the only trains running on those tracks were 40-mph freights?
When I read these arguments, I always remember the scene in the Jurassic Park sequel in which a Tyrannosaurus rex is let loose to run through the streets of San Diego. I can imagine the owners of the park saying, “We told people it was dangerous. If they get eaten, it’s their own fault.”
Under Federal Railroad Administration, corridors with trains going 80 miles per hour or more must be “sealed.” This means, among other things, that crossing gates must cover the entire width of a road crossing so there is no way for cars to get around them. Brightline avoided the expense of installing such gates by running its trains between Miami and West Palm Beach at no more than 79 miles per hour (though they probably creep up to 80 or more at times).
Sealed also means fencing to prevent pedestrians from walking on the railroad tracks. Dozens of such pedestrians have lost their lives to Brightline trains since the service began operating, including at least three in December.
Another Federal Railroad Administration threshold is reached at 125 miles per hour, above which grade crossings are simply not allowed. Brightline is building tracks from Cocao to Orlando on which it says it will run trains at up to 125 miles per hour. That suggests that it expects to still have grade crossings on those tracks. Even though they will be sealed, when they go into service we can expect to hear about people being killed at the crossings, which Brightline will also blame on the victims.
Aventura is midway between Miami and Fort Lauderdale, a highly urbanized area. In most of the country, passenger trains run fairly slowly in urban areas and only operate at 79 miles per hour or more in rural areas. Since the entire region from Miami to West Palm Beach is urban, Brightline is running fast trains in an urbanized area just to be competitive with alternatives.
“The safest grade crossing is one that doesn’t exist,” says the Federal Railroad Administration. “What? You expect us to install overpasses or tunnels every time a road crosses the railroad?” I imaging rail officials saying. “That’s too expensive.” Maybe if it is too expensive to make fast passenger trains safe, they shouldn’t be running the trains at all.
Meanwhile over 3000 people are killed per year in Florida in car accidents. Maybe if it is too expensive to make driving safe, they shouldn’t be driving cars at all.
^ whataboutism
Janehavisham “Meanwhile over 3000 people are killed per year in Florida in car accidents. Maybe if it is too expensive to make driving safe, they shouldn’t be driving cars at all.”
While any deaths are tragic and efforts to avoid them should be made, they have to be considered against the benefits and alternatives. Fatalities should be compared on a per passenger mile per passenger mile traveled. From:
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state
Florida has 1.41 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, almost three times Massachusetts rate of 0.51. To save lives, why not determine why Florida auto deaths are so much higher than Massachusetts and make changes to roads and driving accordingly?
I couldn’t find a reference on deaths per 100 million passenger miles on Brightline, but with five deaths in the last month:
https://www.newsweek.com/floridas-brightline-passenger-train-hits-kills-pedestrian-marking-5th-death-since-dec-7-1665553
Compared to deaths per passenger mile on Brightline is difficult as I couldn’t find any direct calculation of this on line. Since Brightline only carried about 1 million passengers in 2019:
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/business/2020/01/20/brightline-passenger-counts-revenue-remain-well-below-companyrsquos-own-projections/112219668/
It would seem likely that per passenger mile deaths on Brightline are higher than those for driving. Most who drive consider the risks well worth the benefit. Are the benefits of Brightline worth the number of deaths?
Railroad officials were quick to blame the latest accident on the auto driver, who drove “around the gates, which were down, flashing and bells ringing, signaling an approaching train.”
Well yeah when you put it that way………it is the drivers fault. To subject them to a standard……..
“It seems likely” …bullshit. Show me the deaths per passenger mile. And the antiplanner said nothing in his post about per passenger mile, he just said “safe”.
According to the US Department of Transportation, there are about 5,800 train-car crashes each year in the United States, most of which occur at railroad crossings. These accidents cause 600 deaths and injure about 2,300. More than half of all fatal train accidents occur at train crossings that do not have active safety devises [sic] or have safety devices that are simply inadequate or, in come cases, have no safety devices to alert unsuspecting motorists.
https://www.mcaleerlaw.com/train-accident-statistics
From the article:
the recent deaths have all occurred in the last month, continuing a trend that shows Brightline to have the worst fatality rate among the country’s approximately 800 railroads since it began test runs in mid-2017, according to an Associated Press analysis of Federal Railroad Administration data.
And then:
An ongoing AP analysis of federal data that began in 2019 shows Brightline trains strike someone about every 33,000 miles traveled.
According to FRA data, Brightline has carried 1,818,464 passengers since its opening. It doesn’t list data on passenger-miles. Fort Lauderdale is 25 miles north of Miami. West Palm Beach is 66 miles north. Assume for the sake of argument that the average trip length is 30 miles. That’s about 54.5 million passenger-miles, to go along with 52 deaths, or about 0.95 deaths per million passenger-miles.
Paul mentioned that Florida has about 1.41 deaths per million vehicle-miles traveled. Since the average vehicle occupancy in the US according to the most recent National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) is 1.67, this works out to about 0.84 deaths per PM. In other words, it has a higher fatality rate than a state with one of the highest road traffic fatality rates in the country. Not surprising, given the quote from the article about how it compares to other railroads.
I should just clarify that that Florida has 1.41 road deaths per 100 million miles, not per million. So, if MJ’s calculation is anything correct, then Brightline is causing 0.95 deaths per million miles or about 95 per 100 million. Several orders of magnitude more than are killed by road deaths per passenger mile. If Janehavisham disagrees with this I would be interested in their references and calculations.
“Brightline Still a Killer” is not a headline that I like very much. “Florida Drivers Still Suicidal” would be a bit more appropriate?
The reason US has higher traffic fatalities…. bad drivers
youtube.com/watch?v=CB37pDnwMag
And we don’t penalize them. Repeated traffic citations are an established pattern of…ignorance. you can fix traffic fatalities in US or cut em by a huge degree…since driving is a privilege, not a right abandon the point system….and simply chart the lower percentile of bad drivers…the worst get license suspended.
Harsher penalties for first timers….
LazyReader good point on traffic rule enforcement and bad drivers. It would be interesting to compare rules and enforcement in high fatality states like Florida to low ones like Massachusetts.
paul, you said “Brightline is causing 0.95 deaths per million miles or about 95 per 100 million.” All you’ve done is divide the number of people killed by the train by the Brightline passenger miles, but you failed to consider the passenger miles of the cars in the vicinity of the Brightline. Not all cars in Florida are in the vicinity of the Brightline of course, but if we take 40 deaths per year by the Brightline and divide that by the 226,514,000,000 vehicle miles driven in Florida from https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state#deaths-by-road-user, we get:
(40/226514000000) * 100,000,000 =
.017658952647 deaths caused by Brightline per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, compared to 1.41 deaths caused by vehicles per 100 million vehicles miles traveled.
Hence, we can see that travel by Brightline is about 1.41/0.017 = 83 times safer than travel by road vehicle.
janehavisham,
As I read you last post you have taken the number of deaths caused by Brightline and divided it by the total VMT of Florida and concluded Brightline is safe. I am hesitant to comment on this because I get the feeling I am missing the joke. Do you seriously think this is a legitimate calculation?
Apparently drivers in some other countries have worse drivers….
Road deaths per billion vehicle km
Mexico 27.5
South Korea 13.8
Czechia 11.5
Belgium 7.3
Hong Kong 7.3
United States 7.3
New Zealand 7.2
Slovenia 7.0
Japan 6.4
Israel 5.9
.
Builder, yeah, there’s no jokes involved in my posts. They are every bit as serious as The Antiplanner’s contention that 5 deaths by trains is unacceptable but a hundred times as many deaths by road vehicle is.
”
Brightline is building tracks from Cocao to Orlando on which it says it will run trains at up to 125 miles per hour.
”
There may be none on the ~30-40 mile Cocoa to MCO stretch for 2 reasons. The first is that most all is being built within the right of way of existing freeways so there would be few xings needed because few roads cross over or under a freeway.
MOre so, the ~30 mile stretch between FL 417 ( 5 miles east of MCO; Orlando ring freeway ) and I-95 is almost all wildlife refuge / state preserve / etc. It’s low and swampy even by Florida standards. So anything that isn’t set aside is unlikely to see much of any development.
There’s just not going to be a need for xings, let along at grade crossings on that stretch. The few xings that are are there are not at-grade. The one exception may be the Dallas Blvd. xing. That may end up being at grade.
There may end up being one or two in the that US1 to I 95 stretch in Cocoa. That may have a couple.
We know there are simple things that can be done to reduce accidents on Brightline. Comparing those simple things with driving death reductions – for which there are no simple solutions at this point; we’ve grabbed the low hanging fruit there — is ignorant of the important distinctions between the two. ONe can be done, the latter isn’t obvious what can be done that isn’t insanely expensive.
There’s a value placed on the life lost. IIRC the USDOT says it’s $5 to $10 million dollars.
Putting a 2 other crossing arms at a xing so that vehicles can not go around would maybe cost $30K – $60K. We’ll want some pedestrian gates + I’m not great with math so let’s just call it $100K.
There are ~50 xings on Brighline between Miami and West Palm Beach. So we know that for far less than $5 million we can ensure that every at grade crossing a car can NOT go around. If if that change saved a single life, we’d come out ahead.
As I read you last post you have taken the number of deaths caused by Brightline and divided it by the total VMT of Florida and concluded Brightline is safe. I am hesitant to comment on this because I get the feeling I am missing the joke. Do you seriously think this is a legitimate calculation?
It seems like a pretty obvious piss-take to me.
.
Oh, are they? Randal at least makes a token attempt to get a rough estimate of the proper exposure rates to consider in examining the safety of these systems. And I attempted to refine it using available data on train operations. One can quibble over whether train-miles or passenger-miles is the right output measure for this.
What is not up for debate is whether it is acceptable to either ignore levels of exposure or to use wholly unrelated ones (statewide VMT as the basis for calculating the fatality rate for a 65-mile, lightly-used commuter rail line confined to a smaller corner of the state?) as the basis for comparison.
I should just clarify that that Florida has 1.41 road deaths per 100 million miles, not per million.
Thanks for the correction. I was trying to pull together data from multiple sources, and lost sight the units being used. It doesn’t help that when reporting safety data, general crashes are often reported per million vehcile-miles (MVM), while fatal crashes are reported her 100 MVM in order to account for the relative rarity of the events.
One the key clues that this is largely a Brighline issue is that the rate of deaths for Tri-Rail is 4 times as high.