That deadline came and went
On a summer afternoon in Southern California nine years ago, a commuter train blew through a stop signal and ran head-on into an oncoming freight train, killing 25 people.
After investigators determined that the crash could have been prevented by automatic-braking technology, Congress ordered all passenger railroads to install new systems by 2016. Since then, Congress has extended that deadline and trains have kept speeding into preventable disasters, including the Amtrak derailment that killed three people in Western Washington on Monday.
In Amtrak’s case, this is a recurring nightmare. The crash this week was eerily reminiscent of one just two years ago in Philadelphia, where an Amtrak train barreled into a sweeping curve at 106 miles an hour before jumping the tracks and rolling over. Eight people died.
That crash, too, could have been prevented by the technology, known as positive train control. But five months after it happened, Congress gave railroads at least three more years to install it.
Well, you have to look at it from their point of view. Installing it will take money and effort. Not installing it is more convenient and cheaper. Naturally Congress is going to say yes sure you can have more time, there’s no hurry.
“Here we are, almost 10 years later, and that deadline came and went,” said Kitty Higgins, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board. “The railroads have been slow-walking it and it still is not implemented. It’s absolutely outrageous.”
But it’s cheaper and less trouble to keep putting it off. That’s the important thing.
Railroads have cited the cost and complexity of adding the technology, which relies on satellites and radio signals to prevent trains from running out of control if an engineer has lost focus or fallen asleep while driving. Industry estimates of the total cost of installation exceed $10 billion.
See? Money and effort! Those don’t grow on trees you know.
Legislators settled for a new deadline of Dec. 31, 2018, with an additional, two-year extension possible on a case-by-case basis. President Barack Obama signed the extension into law in October 2015.
The two Republican lawmakers behind the deadline extension, Representative Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania and Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, were the top two recipients of political campaign contributions from the railroad industry in 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Of course they were.
How is it cheaper to keep running trains into the ground?!
This is a universal attitude across many many issues worldwide I fear.
Locally, we have a huge number of reinforced masonry buildings constructed in the post-colonial period. Many of these are attractive buildings. In many (most?) small towns such buildings are the only commercial buildings available. Many small time investors have sunk their life savings into owning such buildings and that represents the majority of both their cash income and investment for the future.
Problem is that our entire country is earthquake prone. Despite legislation requiring such buildings to be bought up to revised building standards, decades have gone by with very few of these having been upgraded. After the Christchurch earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 the law was changed to introduce National standards and reduced time frames for either upgrading or demolishing these structures.
Now a few years have gone and memories begin to fade, the cries of ‘too expensive’, ‘ruinous’, and ‘not worth the effort – acceptable losses in a disaster’ are coming to the fore again.
I was watching The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) last night. I had sympathy for Klaatu.
When we first got LRT here, about 15 years ago, the German-made trainsets we bought came with a system that would shut them down if they blew through a red signal. All the local people had to do was install the trackside equipment that talks to the thing on the train and tie it into the signal system. Which they did. And this is by no means a high-speed line — maybe 40mph, tops, and usually much slower (it’s just a short in-city transit line). Hard to believe it could be that expensive.
Steve Watson:
It doesn’t have to be expensive to be evil; it only has to cut into profits. The money invested in buying members of Congress represents a much better return.
David Rutten: Believe it or not, it might be. It depends on how much it costs to pay off the passengers (which, of course, is why a favorite target of the GOP is ‘tort reform’–they want to cap punitive damages so that it’s easier to denote them as nothing more than another line-item on the budget).
The line from Fight Club is appropriate, here:
Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.
For ‘recall’ substitute ‘refit’, or other change that could be instituted to save lives. Pushing down ‘B’ is the entire purpose of tort reform.