The act enhances train safety without onerous costs. I’d support it.
I’m troubled by our objections to the Railway Safety Act as stated in our editorial.
It’s uncontroversial for conservatives to regulate private industry to prevent industry from imposing on the public. Train derailments are rare in the United States, but we have more of them per train than do our peers in Europe and Japan. And train derailments can be costly. It cost $30.5 million to clean up one such derailment in New Jersey in 2012.
Much of the bill’s effective substance is applying regulations on the train transport of crude oil that have existed since 2015 to other hazardous materials such as flammable gas. This is commonsensical. The industry has already concluded that mechanical wayside bearing-defect detectors, which could have prevented the derailment at East Palestine, need to be more densely planted across the rail network than they are currently (every 40 miles). Industry has suggested every 15 miles; the bill mandates them every ten miles.
Our editorial argues:
The bill also includes sweetheart provisions for organized labor. The first is that it would mandate two-man train crews. That’s the industry standard right now, and such a rule would have little effect on current operations. (The train that derailed in East Palestine had three crewmen onboard.) The danger of adopting such a rule is that it would forestall future innovation in automation technology, which could increase safety down the road.
Either the two-man crew is a sop to organized labor, or it is industry standard that has little effect. It can’t really be both. Or we could look at it for what it is: common sense given the history of catastrophic derailments.
The 2013 Lac-Mégantic train disaster in Quebec, which resulted in 47 deaths, happened on a one-crew-member train. The U.S. Federal Railroad Administration stated in an assessment of that disaster that “railroads that provide two qualified crewmembers, who can work as an effective team on those unit trains (which commonly consist of over 100 loaded tank cars of crude oil), improve the safety of those operations.”
Beyond common sense, I know for certain that hypothetical future robots are not an argument against adopting safety rules in the present. If the cost of the regulation is onerous, then investing in the technology to obviate it will still be economically sound. Our argument reduced to its absurdity is that we could put even more pressure on these presumably superefficient future safety robots to come into existence by running millions of pounds of hazardous materials entirely unmanned in the present.
Our editorial argues that the regulations could divert some shipments to trucks, and trucks are involved in more accidents than trains. But truck accidents, unlike train derailments, do not have the ability to wreck entire towns. Trucks carry a federally mandated maximum load of 80,000 lb. And further, hazardous materials in trucks are carried in smaller 55-gallon drums or 250-gallon IBCs, not all of which break in an accident, whereas a single punctured hazmat tanker car at East Palestine’s derailment contained 177,000 lb. of gas. The greater the potential public burden of an accident, the greater the regulatory burden.
Later in the same editorial, we criticize section 4 of the bill, and again use hypothetical robots as a reason not to raise safety standards in the present. We criticize a measure that requires railroad operators to deploy “qualified inspectors” as another gift to unions. But the debate in the industry is not between union and nonunion inspectors. It is between whether carmen, who have a yearslong apprenticeship in the matter, are the inspectors, or just conductors who don’t. Both are currently union jobs, and the bill is silent on whether qualified mechanical inspectors are union or nonunion.
The bill enhances train safety without onerous costs. I’d support it.