Tag: joe Biden

“The 53-car freight train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, last year was operated by a crew of three men, none of whom were able to prevent the cascade of mechanical and communication failures that led to the unfortunate accident.
In response to that crash, the federal Department of Transportation announced on Tuesday a new policy requiring freight trains to operate with at least two-person crews—a mandate that the Biden administration says will enhance rail safety.

If you’ve passed first grade, you might now find yourself asking a rather basic question: Isn’t three more than two?

Rest assured that it is. However, in Washington, the policy-making calculus often relies on fuzzy math that is heavily influenced by the pull of special interests and the strong sense of do-something-ism.

Both are on display in the new freight railroad mandate. The derailment in East Palestine was bad, and something must be done. This is something, so now it is being done—and bonus points can be scored because doing this specific thing will please the Biden administration’s labor union allies, which have been lobbying the government for years to impose exactly this two-person crew mandate.

On Tuesday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said it should be “common sense” that “large freight trains, some of which can be over three miles long, should have at least two crew members on board.”

The length of the train has absolutely nothing to do with it, but Buttigieg is gesturing toward the idea that a second person on board could bring the train to a halt if the driver is somehow incapacitated. And, indeed, it was longstanding railroading practice to have multiple people in the cab of freight trains for exactly this reason.

These days, however, it is automation and not a backup engineer that is responsible for a dramatic decline in railway accidents and injuries. Thanks to positive train control (PTC)—essentially a computer-based override system that monitors speed and track signals to avert collisions, and which railroads have been mandated by Congress to use since 2008—rail accidents have fallen by 30 percent while employee injuries are down 40 percent since 2000, according to data from the Association of American Railroads (AAR), an industry group.

Additionally, Buttigieg’s claim about “common sense” comports with neither the specifics of the East Palestine accident nor recent governmental reviews of the two-person crew mandate.

The Federal Railroad Administration spent three years investigating a proposed two-person crew mandate before concluding in 2019 that the rule was not “necessary or appropriate for railroad operations to be conducted safely,” largely because of the safety gains already made by automation. More recently, Congress considered—but, notably, did not enact—a two-member crew mandate in the wake of the East Palestine derailment.

As for the the East Palestine incident, having a crew of 10 people driving the train likely wouldn’t have made any difference. The crash was caused by an overheated wheel bearing, which failed and derailed the train as the crew was attempting to bring it to a stop. The three-person crew should have been alerted to the problem sooner, but at least one track-side detector meant to spot the wheel issue was not working properly.”

https://reason.com/2024/04/02/no-bidens-new-rail-crew-mandate-doesnt-make-common-sense/