Resisting The "Voices"

Now that railroading has gotten its extension of the congressional mandate for installation of Positive Train Control (PTC), I am hearing a chorus of voices saying that railroads have traded safety for profit. Oh, really?

I guess it’s true today that, no matter what you do or what business you are in, there will be a plethora of voices telling you how to run your business. The loudest voices seem to come from three areas: Traditional media, advocacy groups, and social media. Let’s take these one at a time.

Traditional media (as opposed to industry media and/or rail enthusiast media) should know better. In my humble opinion, reporters in the general or traditional media, newspapers, magazines, radio and television, even cable news, are insufficiently informed as to what PTC is and what it does. Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my efforts to provide that information, but I doubt that an average media reporter has read beyond the pretty pictures. Most are simply not well informed on rail safety issues to form such an opinion—and it is an opinion. There is no objective evidence that accidents are on the increase because of a lax attitude on the part of railroad management, and there is certainly no objective proof that all accidents which have occurred would have been prevented 100% by PTC. Yet the media portrays PTC as making railroading 100% absolutely safe!

Advocacy groups fall into two categories. Those who advocate for railroad related industry, and those who advocate for public safety. The NTSB (see graphic) is one of the latter, but it is also a fact finding agency. It’s a kind of hybrid, looking over the situation from afar, but not being in control of it, as is the Federal Railroad Administration(FRA) and/or Congress. There is a third group I would lump into the public safety category consisting of lawyers who, for some reason, believe that their clients are always right. Railroad related industry would like to see the railroads spend gobs more money on PTC (than they already have) because it keeps their businesses going. Advocates for public safety often have the same overblown understanding of what PTC is as does the traditional media. (You will note that the NTSB graphic doesn’t mention all the accidents that would not have been prevented by PTC.) But I guarantee that if protesters stand in front of a moving train with PTC, the train will take the same amount of time to stop and kill just as many of them as it would have had there been no PTC. PTC doesn’t see somebody walking across a railroad right of way, or trespassing, and could not be designed to stop trains every time somebody (on an animal) lingers while crossing at a legal or illegal crossing. The trains would never move.

Finally, there is social media. Say or do anything on social media and you will find just about everybody has an opinion about it. Railroads saying they would have to shut down if they didn’t get an extension wasn’t “holding the public hostage.” The railroads were legitimately trying to protect their bottom line from the catch 22 of an impossible deadline and the imposition of unreasonable fines by the FRA and any other government entity charged with enforcing federal law. (As a general axiom: Businesses of all kinds fear regulatory fines because they are often arbitrary, unreasonable, and costly to defend in court because of the broad latitude that Congress has allowed regulatory agencies in the creation of laws with arbitrary requirements like the PTC deadline.)

In my opinion, the railroads were perfectly justified in asking for the extension, and are in most cases, having already spend millions, working diligently toward implementation. They are also perfectly justified in resisting or ignoring many of the “voices.” If there are any demons in this, they are the “make a new law” and “no extensions” contingents of all of the above groups who never give a thought to what it might cost to implement said law, or what consequences might arise from no extensions. I will welcome PTC, but I will welcome it done right. Rushing it is not doing it right.

©2016 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com