|
|
| Re: SEPTA to spend $100 million on PTC (unfunded federal mandate); other projects take hit (1143152) | |||
 |
|||
| Home > SubChat | |||
|
[ Read Responses | Post a New Response | Return to the Index ] |
|
||
|
Re: SEPTA to spend $100 million on PTC (unfunded federal mandate); other projects take hit |
|
|
Posted by Jersey Mike on Mon Mar 5 11:17:29 2012, in response to Re: SEPTA to spend $100 million on PTC (unfunded federal mandate); other projects take hit, posted by J trainloco on Fri Mar 2 18:23:24 2012. Yeah, in other words: there's a level of death that's acceptable to tolerate because it's cheaper to let these people die than it would be to outfit a system that could save them. That's inhumane.No, its called reality, you should try acknowledging it. Spending large amounts of money to save small amounts of life is making us less well off because there are still cases where spending that same money could save large amounts of life. Except that there have been numerous incidents that would've been prevented with PTC. The number of PTC preventible accidents resulting in passenger fatalities starting with the Chase, MD accident in 1986 is somewhere between 5 and 10 and only 3 of those had any significant causalities. Personally I can only think of 5 such accidents, but I'm not going to waste my time trying to track down every last one. Of those, I am aware of only one (the first MetroLink accident) that may have failed to be preventible by cab signaling as currently employed. Unlimited money? The cost is defined. It's not 'unlimited'. Considering the cost per mile of constructing new rail projects in this country, the proposed price for PTC doesn't seem exceptional. I don't believe that $100 million number considering that the MBTA projected something closer to $400 million and Metro North $700 million. Look for it to double or triple as time goes on. Either way PTC will degrade service, and given SEPTA's piss poor cab signal implementation it will probably degrade it significantly. Paying more for worse service is insult to injury. I don't consider omitting a practical safety concept that many transit properties have been using for decades an acceptable tradeoff. Railroads are not transit. They have higher skill workers, lower cost infrastructure and greater operating flexibility. Tell me the last time you got a transit ride that didn't suck. As the sunset limited wreck in Arizona proved, if someone wants to screw with your signals, they will. Forcing an attacker to assert physical presence is a huge win. If someone in China wants to screw with our signals they have to get a viva, buy a plane ticket, fly to our country, drive somewhere, tamper with the signals, then get back home. With CBTC they can walk to their internet cafe and turn on a laptop. Once you implement cab signalling, making it enforced cab signalling is the next logical jump. First of all for passenger trains cab signals ARE enforced down to a speed where most accidents don't matter. For freight trains it is impractical to enforce them because their handling characteristic are not easy to model. PTC systems can come close, but still fall far short of what an engineer can do based on their years of experience and training. Standard signal systems have the same issue. If a standard signaling system breaks there are manual fallback systems. If a locomotive's PTC box breaks it cannot depart its initial terminal until the safety appliance is fixed. That means your train gets annulled. This problem already exists with standard cabs, but those are a much simpler system. "Will probably"… sounds like your opinion. The FRA's regulatory release said that PTC was likely to reduce the capacity of the US rail network. Also, ask any systems engineer...when safety systems are added it will almost always degrade the performance of the system being made "safer". It is possible to install a PTC system that does not degrade performance, but this means doing things like setting the PTC enforced speeds to the overturn or derailment speed instead of the rulebook/comfost/coffee cup speed so that the engineer won't be conditioned to operate below the posted speed to avoid a PTC enforcement action. However if the FRA/rail operators would be gutsy enough to allow this is highly doubtful and will simply take the performance hit. We can argue the points to death, but the simple fact is PTC will prevent collisions we will never know about. If that saves even a single life, then since you can't replace anyone's life, it's worth it. But you are insisting that we not do so until a horrific accident with a high body count occurs. There's just no point arguing with you because its clear you're a "think of the children"-er, but I'll try one last this. THIS IS WHY YOU ARE WRONG Opportunity cost is the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the next best alternative forgone (that is not chosen). It is the sacrifice related to the second best choice available to someone, or group, who has picked among several mutually exclusive choices. The opportunity cost is also the cost of the forgone products after making a choice. Opportunity cost is a key concept in economics, and has been described as expressing "the basic relationship between scarcity and choice". The notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in ensuring that scarce resources are used efficiently. Thus, opportunity costs are not restricted to monetary or financial costs: the real cost of output forgone, lost time, pleasure or any other benefit that provides utility should also be considered opportunity costs. In the REAL WORLD money does not grow on trees. When the government chooses to fund PTC it means it chooses NOT to fund something like healthcare, or transit expansion or basic research. By spending 15 BILLION dollars to implement PTC nationwide that's a lot of people you could helping or saving in other ways...far more than the few that would ever be helped by PTC. A wise man once said "The good of the many outweighs the good of the good of the few, or the one. Try to learn that before you ever try to make decisions that might affect people or organizations. |
|
|
|