Tracks: Their Money or Your Life: Rail Safety and You
Four companies own 90 percent of the rail in the United States. On the West Coast, Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) own the rail. What if the 405 freeway was owned by one guy and the 110 freeway was owned by another guy and your safety was dependent on how well their stock was doing?
Let’s take ... oh, say ... Metrolink. It’s run by Veolia Transportation, a private transportation provider with headquarters in France and a primary office in Oak Bridge, Illinois. According to the Department of Transportation’s Department of Safety, over the last decade Metrolink has had a 100 percent increase in deaths and a 121 percent increase in injuries.
In light of last month’s Metrolink crash: Should the federal government take over the running of the rail lines that are currently owned and operated by private companies?
The Federal Aviation Association (FAA) has many regulations the airlines must follow in order to fly, but rail isn’t regulated in the same way. There is a Federal Railroad Association (FRA), but its oversight seems to possess a vastly lighter touch than that of the FAA.
“Our job is to promote and try to ensure safety of railroads,” said Warren Flatau, senior public affairs specialist for the Office of Policy and Communications at the FRA. “[The Metrolink crash] was largely preventable,” Flatau conceded.
Mr. Flatau knows it was “largely preventable” because of studies done by the FRA, the findings of which would be implemented in the passage of HR 2095 (the Federal Railroad Improvement act of 2007). HR 2095 would implement Positive Train Control (PTC), which would use the BNSF Railway’s Electronic Train Management System (ETMS). The ETMS would first warn an engineer of potential problems and then engage the airbrakes of the train if those warnings did not work.
An FRA document referencing a 2006 report on safety stated: “FRA has not been able to mandate PTC implementation, due to the limitations associated with, and outcome of the cost-benefit analysis required by law.”
If safety is a concern, it should come before costs. The Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act of 1997, which placed a $200 million cap on payouts for a single accident on a rail line, may well have been a prominent factor in letting this tragedy occur. With that cap, an unsafe train costs less money than a safe train: It would have cost $2.3 billion to implement PTC on 100,000 miles of track.
We need mandates, not suggestions – mandates that are implemented immediately. A decade is too long to wait for implementing technology that will prevent people from serious injury. The implementation of PTC, if HR 2095 passes, won’t be complete until 2014.
Said an anonymous spokesperson from Congressman Henry Waxman’s D.C. office (how do you like that?), when asked how she felt about the rails being owned by or more strictly controlled by the government, “It would probably be pretty controversial with the rail industry ... . The railroad companies are responsible for a lot of the investments in the rails.”
Human life shouldn’t be a commodity, tossed about in corporate boardrooms. Should we allow private interests to dictate public safety? We are in a new era, and the rails of our country should be owned by the people.
Published: 10/01/2008
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