Dominic takes issue with my support of the Railway Safety Act.
On my indifference to the idea that some chemical shipments may go to trucks rather than rail, Dominic writes:
The preferability of trains over trucks for safety is not really in dispute, and I was surprised to see Michael question it. As I wrote last month:
Between 1990 and 2021, there were 519,118 hazardous-materials incidents in the U.S., resulting in 462 total fatalities. Eighty-eight percent of those incidents were on highways, as were 328 of those fatalities. Only 21 fatalities were on railroads. Roughly twice as many people were injured in hazardous-materials accidents on highways than in accidents on rail in that same period, and property damage was over 2.5 times higher.
If all chemicals could make all journeys equally by rail or by truck, this would be persuasive. But when you click through the individual fatality-incident reports, you will find almost all the highway fatalities are gasoline leaks and fires. This including all the fatal highway incidents in 2021 and 2020 . Many of the injury reports recorded by DOT do not finger the hazardous material as the cause. None of those incidents resulted in an evacuation or significant environmental damage. Gasoline is transported by truck commonly because it often has to get to places that train cars cannot go. We do not know that the Railway Safety Act is going to significantly change the amount of gasoline shipped by rail to shipped by truck. The decision of one over the other is far more likely determined by the total existing infrastructure of gas needs and rail geography than by the mandating of two-man crews or the increase of automated bearing detectors. Does Dominic favor any more regulations on the shipment of gasoline by truck that might perhaps divert it to the safety of rail? Or does he accept that some amount of trucking of gasoline is determined by other factors than regulatory ones?
And, as I mentioned, the issue that the Railway Safety Act is meant to address isn’t just the danger to hazmat material in general. It’s written to address a range of dangers and risks of hazmat rail transport. Hazardous materials will continue to be trucked and shipped by rail; the question is what regulations are fit for each mode.
Dominic writes that my argument “never considers the perverse incentives of the bill that would encourage railroads to put more hazmat cars together on the same train.” But, why is this perverse if the incentive is tied to the fact that under these regulations it is precisely these trains that will get more scrutiny?
Dominic goes on to restate the brief for the hypothetical future of safety robots. His thesis is that because laws on the books are hard to repeal, present safety is the enemy of future safety. Legally mandated two-man crews will retard investment in these amazing technologies. I don’t find this persuasive. A cartelized industry like rail is more at risk of not investing in innovation because of its legal privileges, not regulations. If a two-man regulation could stop all investment and interest in automation, it means that the automation is expected to be marginally almost no better than a two-man crew. If our desired standard of safety matches a two-man crew, then mandating it in the present makes sense, when weighed against an entirely hypothetical risk of underinvestment in automation. If automation promises loads more safety, then the economic case will make itself. It’s not like the rail industry has any shortage of contact with Congress that it will be unable to make itself heard once it has labor- and money-saving tech.