House Speaker John Boehner thinks it's
"stupid" to talk about whether underfunding was a cause of Tuesday night's Amtrak crash that killed eight people and injured hundreds more. Boehner has reason to be defensive about funding issues, since the House was in the process of cutting Amtrak funding. But the real answer is yes, there's a
solid likelihood that if Amtrak had more money and other resources, this crash wouldn't have happened.
In 2008, Congress ordered the installation of what are known as positive train control systems, which can detect an out-of-control, speeding train and automatically slow it down. But because lawmakers failed to provide the railroads access to the wireless frequencies required to make the system work, Amtrak was forced to negotiate for airwaves owned by private companies that are often used in mobile broadband. [...]
“The transponders were on the tracks,” said one person who attended a Thursday morning briefing for congressional staff members. “But they also said they weren’t operational, because of this ongoing spectrum issue.”
According to the FCC, Amtrak had
finally gotten approval for the needed bandwidth in March. But the system was still being tested.
PTC is expensive, and when the Federal Railroad Administration asked Congress for extra funding to install it, guess what happened. That's right, they didn't get it. Never mind John Boehner's claim that it's "stupid" to ask if the crash was in part a funding issue, because, as he put it, "Adequate funds were there, no money’s been cut from rail safety." Sen. Chuck Schumer had the right response to that nonsense:
“Speaker Boehner’s comments are patently false,” Schumer said in a statement. “Experts have made clear that Positive Train Control [PTC] could have prevented the tragedy in Philadelphia.” [...]
“It is simply a fact that insufficient funding for Amtrak has delayed the installation of PTC, and to deny a connection between the accident and underfunding Amtrak is to deny reality,” Schumer added.
