Trains are, over all, an incredibly reliable means of moving people efficiently and economically through crowded corridors, as Bryan Walsh recently pointed out in Time.
But these systems can be made safer, affordably. And the need for improvements has never been clearer than in the past week, as the New York region grappled with the human toll (four deaths and dozens of serious injuries) from the completely avoidable derailment of a Metro-North commuter train one week ago.
On Friday, I attended the funeral of one of the victims, Jim Lovell — a longtime, and much loved, resident of Philipstown, N.Y., my community since 1991. (I don't normally take photos at such events, but couldn't avoid shooting the image above while standing with the overflow crowd in the chill rain outside the church.)
The Federal Railroad Administration has issued an emergency order requiring the railroad to take immediate stopgap steps to cut chances of such a calamity.
But what's really needed is a shift in our politics and culture so that after-the-fact stopgaps are not the only response. Can we invest for the long haul to improve the safety and reliability of a basic public good like railways? We'll see.
A few days ago the Editorial Board of The Times nicely summarized how Congress, pressed by the railroad industry, has only slowly heeded decades of calls from the National Transportation Safety Board to require "positive train control" systems that can automatically slow a speeding train:
Congress ignored the agency for decades. Not until a deadly crash of a Metrolink commuter train in Chatsworth, Calif., in 2008 (the engineer was texting; 25 people died) did it pass a law requiring railroads that carry passengers and highly dangerous chemicals, like chlorine, to have positive train control by 2015. But the railroad lobby has been trying to push the date to 2020 or beyond, saying meeting the deadline is too expensive and complicated.
Last year, the Obama administration, bowing to industry pressure, exempted 10,000 miles of track across the country from the safety mandate. In the New York area, Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road have been working to meet the mandate since 2009, and expect to spend $900 million to do so, but they have pressed for an extension, too, citing difficulties ranging from negotiating labor contracts to buying radio bandwidth and software.
The Government Accountability Office reported in August that three of the four major freight railroads and four of the seven major commuter railroads expected to blow the deadline. It found that commuter railroads in particular are hampered by a lack of federal financing and "limited sources of revenue" for big capital investments.
That's the story of railroad infrastructure in America: creaky and underfinanced, shakily propped up by riders paying ever higher fares….
If Congress had done its job decades ago, human failure could have been taken out of the equation on Sunday. The engineer, William Rockefeller, could have been passed out or having a heart attack, and the train would not have derailed. Four passengers would be alive; the rest unhurt.
Wherever the investigation leads, the ultimate blame for this tragedy seems to be a deficit of money and political will, and years of wasted time.
I was glad the congressman from my district, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, introduced a bill last week, the Commuter Rail Passenger Safety Act, that would help railroads like Metro-North finance positive train control systems through an existing program providing loans or loan guarantees for upgrading railroad infrastructure. Other federal lawmakers called for different steps today.
Check back through the coming year to see how they've done.
There's one more question to consider: Can we avoid the bad human habit of always tending to fight the last war? Last week, the tragedy was on the rails. But the transportation safety board has an annual Most Wanted List of what it sees as "the most critical changes needed to reduce transportation accidents and save lives."
Deploying positive train control technology is just one of 10 smart steps that could be taken now to cut risks in everything from airlines to pipelines.
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Dot Earth Blog: The Politics of Runaway Trains and Other Avoidable Calamities
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