Fail proof?

I've read several opinion pieces over the past few weeks that have a common theme: Railroads will become a transportation footnote in the United States unless (fill in the blank) is done and done now! Many look at U.S. railroads and believe that failure is built into the system. They conclude that the whole system has to be changed.

Despite the very real fact that railroads are a 19th-century technology, they have performed admirably for almost two centuries and have adapted throughout a wide range of technological advances and levels of engineering expertise. Also despite the age of the basic technology, railroads are extraordinarily complex systems. Over time, as with all technology over time, railroads have devised systems to leverage a financial advantage to the owners and stockholders of the railroads. Sometimes, this has been at the expense of safety.

In the United States, and almost without exception, government has thrown the railroads a raw deal when it comes to regulation, taxes, and policy. For years, onerous regulations focused on competition between railroads while other forms of transportation came to the fore. Railroads that are privately held pay taxes on property and real estate, while roads, road bridges, airports, airway controls and waterways pay any taxes at all and rarely provide any money to public treasuries. As soon as the internal combustion engine became the prime mover for transportation, government subsidized highways and airways in more ways than just taking the land they occupy off the tax rolls. During most of the twentieth century, the automobile advanced what is now a century-old technology, in part at the expense of taxpayers, and nobody is saying that automobiles are a failed, archaic technology.

Automobiles have never been fail proof. In fact, there are far more accidents per passenger mile in automobiles, and far more accidents per ton mile in trucks, than there are in either passenger or freight trains. But don't railroads run over people and other vehicles more often? That's a matter of false perception. When railroads hit something, they hit it hard. That kind of visual sells media coverage. But statistics have repeatedly shown that rail is safer than truck or auto even when injury and death to so-called non-users is factored in.

So why the push to make railroads fail proof? Part of the reason may be the visuals mentioned above. A train accident is so huge against the scale of a car or even a heavy truck that media hype gets people in the "let's do something about this" mode.

Next time I'll talk more about fail proof.