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| Re: SEPTA to spend $100 million on PTC (unfunded federal mandate); other projects take hit (1142421) | |||
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Re: SEPTA to spend $100 million on PTC (unfunded federal mandate); other projects take hit |
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Posted by WillD on Thu Mar 1 01:02:34 2012, in response to Re: SEPTA to spend $100 million on PTC (unfunded federal mandate); other projects take hit, posted by Jersey Mike on Wed Feb 29 10:40:28 2012. Study after study has shown that PTC is NOT economically justified.For FREIGHT lines. The AAR hasn't has the gall to tread upon the NTSB's recommendations for passenger railroads. It's bad enough they're responsible for the regulatory capture of the FRA which has resulted in this mess. I am actually not aware of any fatality producing PTC-preventable accident accident in the history of SEPTA's service. Again with your requirement that we have bloodied and broken bodies lying across the tracks before we can justify the expenditure for even the most rudimentary safety implements recommended by the NTSB. Sure something "might" happen, but you can't base public policy on the worst case scenario That is completely and utterly false. It is absolutely unacceptable for two trains to touch each other in any way. 36 lawsuits and 39 claims originated from the Abington cornfield meet. Even if they were settled for an average of less than 1 million dollars the PTC system will have paid for itself with just 3 averted collisions. What actually happens is that train-train crashes are a highly rare event and most of the time when they do happen few if any are hurt or killed. In the past 15 years we've barely managed to average more than 3 years between incidents where train-train collisions occur. They're hardly 'rare', and especially not 'highly rare'. 40 claims of injuries from the Abington crash, nor the hundreds who claimed injuries in the Chatsworth crash certainly do not qualify as 'few' people being injured. First of all the economic value of a human life is 2 million, not 10. Metrolink offered a $200 million dollar settlement to the families of the 25 people killed in the Chatsworth collision. $10 million is much closer to the amount any transit system could expect to pay in damages for each person killed in a collision. Because cab signals come with automatic speed control and acknowledgment. The engineer of the southbound train passed three signals without obeying them, and was operating at speeds in excess of the indications he claimed to have seen on the signals he'd violated. Reaching over to acknowledge the signal, or worse, cut out the cab signal system because he thought he knew better would not have been out of the question. |
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