Opinion: Train Safety Measures Should Not Be Delayed

Moorpark is where the Metrolink trip to Los Angeles begins. This area suffered enormous tragedy in 2008, losing too many local citizens in the avoidable train wreck.

The good news is plans were made to put in place a system that would help similar accidents from happening. The bad news is Republicans are trying to place the preferences of Big Business over the welfare and safety of mere citizens. They have proposed legislation to delay by five years the installation of positive train control on all trains in the country.

That means the Rail Improvement Safety Act of 2008 will not go into effect until the year 2020. How many people do you think will be maimed or killed in train wrecks between the years 2015 and 2020? What if I told you that the answer could be close to zero, but only if the deadline of Dec. 31, 2015, were truly a deadline?

The railroads say it will cost too much money to have the safety system in place by 2015, a full seven years after the law was passed. The law was the Bush Administration’s response to the 2008 Metrolink crash in Chatsworth that robbed 24 passengers (plus the engineer who caused the wreck) of their lives and ruined the lives of many of the 135 passengers who were injured.

I would like to add that the cost of any significant advance in transportation will only rise each year if the Republican-sponsored delay becomes law. Does it make any sense to delay the deadline? Yes, if your goal is to avoid ever having to install positive train control (PTC, a GPS—guided system that would control the nation’s 70,000 miles of tracks. It would have the ability to monitor where all trains are located and remotely stop any trains that are headed toward a crash.

After the initial investment in PTC, it would continuously provide benefits to the railroads. The Federal Railroad Administration commented that PTC would yield “improved running time. . . higher asset utilization, and greater track capacity.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein declared in 2008, “Positive train control is in place on other rail systems to prevent human error from causing fatal disaster. . . If positive train control had been in place on Metrolink on Sept. 12, I believe 25 people would still be alive today.”

What you might not know is that various forms of automatic train stopping have been invented, installed and removed a number of times over the past 50 years. In 1987, Burlington Northern Railroad developed a system similar to PTC, also using GPS, called Advanced Electronic Railroad Systems. In 1991, Harvard Business School studied the system that cost $350 million at the time and wrote of their “zealous advocacy of the project.” It would save lives and money for the railroad. But rail executives didn’t see it the same way and killed the system.

Another similar system was subsequently developed and, in 2004, a consultancy group declared that both systems provide “significant business benefits to the freight railroads as well as unquestioned safety benefits through positive enforcement of movement authorities.”

So when the politicians lament that PTC is just too expensive right now and must be postponed for another five years, question their grasp of the facts, their veracity and their motivation.

The National Transportation Safety Board placed PTC at the top of its list of safety measures back in 1990. It emphasized the need for a system to prevent crashes where passenger trains and freight trains share a single track.  

In spite of the determination of Republican politicians to do whatever the railroads want, the local Metrolink system has plowed ahead by itself. At a cost of $201 million, much progress has been made by the determined and practical Metrolink Transportation Board in the development and installation of PTC. Kudos to our own officials for bucking the political excuses and lies coming from our nation’s capitol.

Even Sacramento is obsessed with a bullet train despite its failure to address the current system’s dangers.

But local officials have had the courage and fortitude to forge ahead and do the right thing. They have demonstrated that one train system can be made safer for the most valuable cargo on the tracks, the passengers. Makes me even prouder to be a Moorpark resident.