(Cross Posted at The Makeshift Academic)
Little bureaucratic rule changes can sometimes make a big difference. And a pending rule change at the Federal Railroad Administration, which oversees safety on America's railways, will drastically cut costs, improve reliability, and maintain or increase safety standards.
The FRA has traditionally focused on safety in terms of "collision survival" while its European and Japanese counterparts have evolved to think of it as "collision avoidance." As a result, other countries have invested heavily in Positive Train Control systems, which track train location and speed and automatically stop trains to avoid collisions. In contrast, the U.S. has stayed with a traditional safety style of armoring its trains to protect occupants in a collision.
Despite several high-profile crashes, European passenger rail systems have a sterling safety record. Many U.S. rail corridors are investing in PTC technology to meet an FRA deadline of 2015 to install it on all Class I railroad mainlines. The mandate may be delayed, but the Northeast corridor and major Amtrak routes are making progress on the mandate (notably in Michigan and Illinois)
But for now, this difference in regulations also means that it's illegal for standard European and Japanese train designs, which are considerably ahead of their U.S counterparts technologically, to run on U.S. tracks. (They invested in passenger rail between 1950 and 2000, while we abandoned it in favor of highways and air travel.)
As a result, we need to special-order train sets that cost more. The transit expert Alon Levy has estimated that the incoming Amtrak City Sprinter locomotive costs 35 percent more than the established European design that it's based on -- which works out to around $70-150 million for the order. (That's enough money to make significant improvements on a moderately traveled train route, like Michigan's Amtrak services.
Worse yet, the heavier trains consumer more fuel and often cost more to maintain, due to the increased wear and tear the extra weight places on things like braking systems (which also degrade safety)
The pending FRA rule change will greatly ease many of the obsolete standards to allow modern European designs onto U.S railways, which will ease the issues of cost and poor performance that plague Amtrak equipment and American commuter rail systems.
The rule improvement is important, but it isn't isolated -- It's part of a slow and steady change that's been coming over the American passenger rail system for the last decade or so.
For example, despite its problems caused in part existing weight rules, the AMTRAK Sprinter order (which will serve on standard-speed NE corridor and the eastern Pennsylvania Keystone service) actually is a great improvement over past practices. First, the order is large enough that it will spread the costs over a reasonably number of units (70) instead of past orders, which relied on as few as 16 units. Second, it standardizes the locomotives in use for the NE Regional Service, which should ease training costs, and lower maintenance from the current investments necessary to maintain the three locomotives currently used in the service. And finally, the Sprinter does represent a number of improvements in performance and efficiency from its predecessors.
So two cheers for the bureaucrats who finally look like they are getting this rule right. (I'll take any piece of good news on public policy these days). And here's hoping that the changing culture at the FRA can keep looking forward to ease the expansion of rail travel in the United States.
Now, if only we could get some follow-on investment from the feds in rail capital improvements, and fewer governors like Scott Walker, John Kasich and Rick Scott.
H/T to Atrios and Robert Cruickshank