Last week, the Washington Post commemorated the 30th anniversary of a horrific Air Florida plane crash with an article about how that crash has led to huge improvements in airline safety. In response to that crash, airlines have improved deicing formulas and have strict rules about how quickly aircraft must take off after being deiced, and pilots have improved their responses to slow ascents.
The end of the article briefly mentions that, just a half hour after the plane crash, Washington’s MetroRail suffered its first fatal accident when a train of flimsy railcars “slammed into a concrete pillar near the Smithsonian station.” Unfortunately, neither this crash, nor a similar but nonfatal 2004 crash, nor the fatal 2009 crash, led Washington’s transit agency to reinforce the vehicles that were so easily subject to telescoping and collapsing. At best, the agency learned to require that new rail cars be better built.
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The lesson for commuters is, if you ride the Washington Metro, avoid the cars whose four-digit number starts with a 1. The lesson for policy makers is that a competitive environment is more likely to produce safety improvements than a subsidized monopoly.
The jaw-dropping amazing part of the story is that the safety of flying US airlines has increased 90% in the last ten years. Considering the complexity of airline flight, the weather, and the near-bankrupt economics of most airlines, the safety of flying was pretty good thirty years ago when the DC crash occurred, but today it is just amazing.
“The lesson for policy makers is that a competitive environment is more likely to produce safety improvements than a subsidized monopoly.”
That’s deep and meaningful. Is it true? Some of the most notorious failures have come from private enterprise. Elixir of Sulpha comes to mind.
The lesson for policy makers is that a competitive environment is more likely to produce safety improvements than a subsidized monopoly.
Tell that to coal miners. Or food consumers. Or water consumers in lightly-regulated countries.
DS
Coal mining is a dangerous business, still it claims only 30 lives in America; a tragic but small number. It kills thousands in China. In 2003, the death rate per million tons of coal mined in China was 130 times higher than in the United States. China produced one third of the world’s coal but accounted for four-fifths of coal mining fatalities. There are thousands of rural illicit mines where people dig and burn coal for cooking and home heating which is a severe air quality issue. Unregulated mining operations account for almost 80 percent of the country’s 16,000 mines. So yeah some regulation is in order.
Even after some deregulation there, airfares in Europe are roughly twice as high as those for comparable distances in the U.S. The question is, Shouldn’t deregulation spur competition, resulting in lower prices? The answer is that many carriers remain state-owned, like Air France, and are only now beginning to cut operating costs. Airline prices have declined steadily since deregulation. The inflation adjusted 1982 constant dollar yield for airlines has fallen from 12.3 cents in 1978 to 7.9 cents in 1997. This means that airline ticket prices are almost 40 percent lower today than they were in 1978 when the airlines were deregulated.
There are few accidents; there just highly publicized. Afterll we’re launching hundreds of millions of people every year. So there is really little risk involved in commercial airlines that it really is silly to be concerned about it.
Food consumption is not very safe in highly regulated North Korea. If the food doesn’t kill you, the lack of food will kill you.
‘Safety improvements’ was the direct object of the italicized sentence in 3. That is: safety improvements are expected in a competetive environment.
Surely no one here – with such command of the data – is arguing the examples I provided are in line with the direct object of the sentence I italicized, which was an assertion in the form of a sentence. A sentence – italicized – that implied privatization of public goods was a likely way to success. Maybe the subject – policy makers – was what rankled so.
Thanks!
DS
Grammar Girl doesn’t understand what Dan said either.
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/complex-sentences.aspx
Dan wrote:
Tell that to coal miners. Or food consumers. Or water consumers in lightly-regulated countries.
Underground coal mining, like firefighting and fishing for crab in the Bering Sea are dangerous activities. I think the people that engage in these occupations (or, in the case of firefighting, do such work on a volunteer basis) know very well that they are doing something that carries the risk of serious injury or even death.
But rail transit is repeatedly marketed as being an incredibly safe mode of transportation.
So tell that to the families that lost loved ones in the Federal Triangle (1982), Fort Totten (2009) and Shady Grove (1996) wrecks.
Tell that to the people that were injured but survived those crashes (and the nonfatal crash at Woodley Park (2004)), where a fast thinking train operator ordered the evacuation of the head-end car moments before impact, almost certainly saving many of his passengers from death.
All of the incidents above involved the flimsy “1000 series” railcars (built by Rohr Industries).
My family lost 7 members in a short period in two separate auto crashes in the ’80s, the second set returning home from the funeral. Driving American cars. There is something to the subsidized monoply idea, surely, for everyone.
DS
Dan wrote:
My family lost 7 members in a short period in two separate auto crashes in the ’80s, the second set returning home from the funeral. Driving American cars. There is something to the subsidized monoply idea, surely, for everyone.
I will not make light of or minimize your losses except to say that one is too many.
Deaths associated with transportation mishaps should be a lot lower than they are today (Google “Vision Zero Sweden” sometime), and they will be, as motor vehicles and highways get better and we continue to fight drunk/drugged/impaired driving (in my opinion, 0.08 limit for alcohol is too high).
Technology cannot eliminate all risks of death and injury (consider the loss of life from the grounding of the high-tech Costa Concordia oceanliner off the Italian coast), but we can use it to our benefit, and I believe that government and the private sector have done so in the airline industry.
But getting back to the 1000 series Rohr railcars in Washington, it was known that these were not very crashworthy as far back as 1982, yet nothing was done about it. That’s bad.
I am sorry to hear about the traffic facilities in Dan’s family. Those are terrible tragedies and they bring the statistical discussions back to the real world.
Correction to last comment:
I am sorry to hear about the traffic fatalities in Dan’s family. Those are terrible tragedies and they bring the statistical discussions back to the real world.
And the death rate per mile on Washington’s subways vs. Washington’s roadways is …
(crickets)