Why trains don't have positive train control

Photo: Stephen Brashear, Getty Images

From Randal O'Toole:

...The railroads have two very good reasons for not enthusiastically installing positive train control as Congress has demanded. First, the cost is high: the Federal Railroad Administration estimates it will cost as much as $24 billion, which is probably more than the annual capital budgets of all the private railroads in the country.

The second reason the railroads are delaying is that the benefits of positive train control–--or at least the version that the railroads are implementing–--are trivial. Take a look at this record of transportation fatalities. While about 35,000 people died on highways in 2015, only about 750 were killed in railroad accidents. Of those 750 deaths, positive train control will significantly reduce only those in the first-line “train accidents,” as opposed to “grade crossings” or “trespassing.” Over the past ten years, the average of the train accidents line is just 10.

Compare positive train control with driverless cars. All of the hardware for driverless cars will be built into the cars themselves, adding perhaps $1,000 to the cost of a new car. By comparison, positive train control will require both modification of locomotives and considerable new infrastructure on the railroads. So the costs are much higher.

Driverless vehicle technology may reduce auto fatalities by as much as 90 percent–--say, 30,000 a year. But even if it only reduces them by 50 percent, driverless technology will produce lots of other benefits: less congestion; increased productivity as people can spend travel time doing more productive things; fuel savings; and so forth. 

Positive train control, however, won’t eliminate the need for someone to drive each train. The only practical benefit is that some fraction of 10 lives would be saved each year...