Feds Order Amtrak To Turn On System That Would've Prevented Crash 393
McGruber writes: Last Tuesday evening, northbound Amtrak Northeast Regional train No. 188 derailed on a curve in Philadelphia, killing eight passengers. The train was traveling in excess of 100 mph, while the curve had a passenger-train speed limit of 50 mph. In response, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is issuing formal emergency orders that will require Amtrak to make sure automatic train control systems work Northbound through Philadelphia at and near the site of the derailment. The FRA is also requiring that Amtrak assess the risk of all curves along the NEC and increase the amount and frequency of speed limit signs along the railroad. FRA's emergency order is newsworthy because Amtrak's existing signal system could have been configured to prevent a train from exceeding speed limits, according to the Wall Street Journal.
No self driving trains? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm baffled that we just might get self driving cars before self driving trains.
Do I really have to state the obvious? It's on *rails*.
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Self-driving trains exist. Vancouver's subway is self-driving. But installing the self-driving signalling system on existing rail lines is expensive. And unions oppose anything that will decrease the number of railway workers. Since a single union has a monopoly on transit work in each city, they have immense power and get essentially anything that they want.
Re:No self driving trains? (Score:4, Interesting)
Unions should fight this, because technology obviously decreases the amount of work people can do, but there's no equivalent political or social drive to reduce the amount of money you need.
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Re:No self driving trains? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, seriously? Nearly every subway, bus and light-rail system in the US already operates under heavy government subsidization, and fares are well below cost.
Put this way: If fares reflected the actual cost of operation (forget profit), they would IMHO just barely compete with Uber. Chuck in a profit margin for future expansion and improvements, and taxicabs could compete.
Re:No self driving trains? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, seriously? Nearly every subway, bus and light-rail system in the US already operates under heavy government subsidization, and fares are well below cost.
Put this way: If fares reflected the actual cost of operation (forget profit), they would IMHO just barely compete with Uber. Chuck in a profit margin for future expansion and improvements, and taxicabs could compete.
It's only a fair comparison if Uber were paying the full unsubsidized cost of roads. Fuel taxes and registration fees pay only a portion of road costs, and there are hidden subsidies in the oil that fuels most cars,
Re:No self driving trains? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I think that depends on the subway. Property taxes already go towards paying for the road in front of most houses, for example, because there's not enough traffic for gasoline taxes(for example) to pay for the upkeep.
In a city where the roads can't keep up, paying at least for the subway transitway makes some sense. The extra transport capacity helps bring customers and employees to the work site. To put it another way, in properly situated sites adjusting things for the extra car traffic would be even m
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...there's no equivalent political or social drive to reduce the amount of money you need.
Well, that's what the unions should fight for, instead of fighting against the technology that makes everybody's lives better. But... money is money, and everybody's just fighting for their own.
Re:No self driving trains? (Score:4, Insightful)
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They also (at least in Canada) work horrible shifts including being almost permanently on call. Overtired engineers and conductors are a problem that the train companies aren't interested in fixing as they want to maximize profits.
Re:No self driving trains? (Score:4, Informative)
In France too, we have the "ligne 14" in Paris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org] which was completely automatic from the beginning and the "ligne 1", which has been automated since 2013.
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To be fair, on the London underground the opening and closing of the doors is a pretty hard thing to get right without a human to work out what it going on between the platform and the train. I wouldn't want some AI algorithm with a camera deciding when to close the doors.
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Regulations most likely require that someone is on the train to oversee operation and help in emergencies anyway. So the cost/benefit analysis may still favour the current state with barely any accidents over a complete overhaul which mostly adds maintenance costs. Self driving cars in contrast mainly benefit the car owner who is not paid to spend hours driving.
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This is true.
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Oversee operations != Drive the train.
There's a lot to be said for automating trains.
Almost all crashes are caused by driver error and most of the rest are down to substandard maintenance with a vanishingly small number caused by odd things like signal failure due to lightning strikes.
A train which can keep an eye on where it's going AND record/report track conditions in realtime would significantly improve the current setup where inspection trains only run over a track at weekly/monthly intervals.
On the UK
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Re:No self driving trains? (Score:5, Funny)
It's on *rails*.
So what? Ruby is, and still it crashes all the time, too.
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So what? Ruby is, and still it crashes all the time, too.
Clearly they need to put it on cogs [coboloncogs.org] then.
Re:No self driving trains? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm baffled that we just might get self driving cars before self driving trains.
Do I really have to state the obvious? It's on *rails*.
We have self-driving trains, but somebody needs deal with the inevitable delays and malfunctioning signals at winter and look out the window to check people do not get stuck in the door, etc. The self-driving once are usually in mostly underground metros where each station is manned, or a personel can get to within 5 minutes if the need arrises.
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What about the self-driving twice?
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But somebody needs deal with the inevitable delays and malfunctioning signals at winter and look out the window to check people do not get stuck in the door, etc.
Translation: Get rid of drivers and replace them with safety patrol officers and maintenance workers who are trained to ensure safety and handle emergencies.
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I figure that 10% of the engineering students get into the major because they thought they will be driving trains.
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Re:No self driving trains? (Score:4, Informative)
I'll relish in those years where I can drive like a mad man and all those self driving cars will part like the red sea.
And those self-driving cars who will at the same time catch you on video and upload the footage to your insurance company and local traffic authorities.....
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All available sources for collecting data should be used to help enforce safety.
Brilliant! Lets turn the entire country into Camden NJ. Not to beat a great quote to death: They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Your whole post really shows a naivety of power, corruption and human nature.
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Not so fast... if you live somewhere that allows you to fly down the road due to 'flow of traffic' laws, prepare to have that speed drop once the majority of cars begin to 'flow' at driverless-governed speeds.
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Re:No self driving trains? (Score:5, Funny)
You want your car to get intoxicated for you?
Re:No self driving trains? (Score:5, Funny)
>> I love driving.
Yeah...could you pick me up and drop me off at work everyday? That would be gre..at.
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Still, I probably couldn't stand being in a self-driving car, and would much prefer to drive it myself.
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With that attitude, the union shouldn't be surprised when somebody does "deal with it" -- Jimmy Hoffa style!
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I don't see how we could know such a thing yet, let alone call it obvious.
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Apparently you, and the downvoters of GP, don't know obvious sarcasm when you see it.
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Re:No self driving trains? (Score:4, Informative)
the evidence from NYC and other large cities is that people have devices called legs that can transport them autonomously for several blocks if necessary from the subway station to their job
there are also possibly apocryphal tales of things called "platforms" where people wait for trains that don't necessarily run every minute
Re:No self driving trains? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you have any idea what the coefficient of friction of steel on steel is, and how much lower it is if there's a little grease on the rails? How are you going to handle driveways and garages? Switches aren't cheap, and you'd need them every 50 feet in suburbs. Farm equipment? Are you going to lay down rails on roads that currently have so little traffic that it doesn't pay to have them paved, or plowed when it snows? How do you handle parking in cities and at shopping malls?
With an owner-driven car, drive one place to buy clothes (put them in the car), several more miles to buy books (put them in the car), still more miles to buy a shovel and a hedge trimmer (put them in the car), then yet more to buy groceries (put them in the car and drive home). You going to do that on public transport? (Don't give me any garbage about how everyone should live in cities -- what a drab, sad world that would be.)
Self-driving cars add cameras (cheap), processors (cheap), and actuators (motors and solenoids, moderate cost). The tough part is the software, but that's a one time expense.
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For a fraction of that effort (although a lot more pain an initial expense) we could lay down rails through every suburb and have automated travel cars.
You don't have a clue how capitalism works, do you? If the market says it's more expensive to put in rail everywhere then there's a good bet that it's more effort. Capitalism has its flaws, but relatively efficient allocation of resources is not one of them.
Re:No self driving trains? (Score:4, Insightful)
At one time there were rails in most cities and the negative part of capitalism helped get rid of them as GM and friends really wanted to build up its bus monopoly. To quote wiki,
Most companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to NCL subsidiaries, but were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the transit industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Capitalism is a high stakes game and if you can get away with cheating, the rewards are large.
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There are four London Underground lines with Automatic Train Operation. There's even a Wikipedia category: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
It's not 100% automatic, the driver has to press a button to close the doors, and another (I think) to tell the train "go when ready".
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Because they represent the people who make the system actually work?
Sure, but that doesn't answer the question...
Their "wants" are not in the public self-interest, they are only in their own self interest.
They directly benefit from NOT improving the train system...
And frankly, if we automate the trains, then they won't be needed at all...
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:and dog eats tail (Score:5, Interesting)
This headline is misleading. We don't yet know what caused the crash, so it's a leap to say PTC could have prevented it. We do know that the train was traveling at a high rate of speed but not the reasons why it was doing that. If it was a systems failure then it's entirely possible that PTC would have been irrelevant. This is just like the rush to judgment against the engineer, who everyone was ready to lynch after the accident; all we know for sure about him at this juncture is his cell phone was turned off and his drug/alcohol test came back clean.
Do some reading about PTC when you have a few minutes; like most Federal mandates it was:
1) Unfunded.
2) Ignored existing technology that could do the job nearly as well for a fraction of the cost.
3) Ineffective, in that there have only been two train accounts in the last 20 years (three if this one is confirmed) that it would have prevented.
Re:and dog eats tail (Score:5, Informative)
This headline is misleading. We don't yet know what caused the crash, so it's a leap to say PTC could have prevented it.
No, your comment is what is misleading. The FRA's emergency order is about Automatic Train Control (ATC), not Positive Train Control ("PTC"). The difference is explained in the final paragraph of the Trains magazine [trains.com] article linked to in the summary:
Automatic train control is a system that will slow or stop a train that is moving too fast for a given stretch of track between installed control points based on signals for the area.....Positive train control is the generic name for train control systems that would slow or stop a train that is moving too fast anywhere along a PTC-covered section of track based on computer-updated speed restrictions and conditions and in areas where train crews are performing maintenance./quote?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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1) Unfunded.
Who cares? None of the Federal mandates on the People are funded. Amtrak can figure out a way to become more efficient and follow the law or the administrators can quit and get out of the way.
They have until the end of this year to get PTC up and running on all trains, or they should be force-marched to Federal prison, like the rest of the hoi-palloi. Live by the sword, die by the run-away train.
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Another aspect of PTC to consider: One big reason that no one has mentioned yet regarding railroads missing the deadline. The GOVERNMENT! An obviously critical part of a PTC installation is tens of thousands of trackside antennas, so the locomotive can communicate with the whole PTC network. Well, guess what? The antennas that the government (FRA, Congress, etc.) is mandating be installed are being held up because the government (EPA and FCC) are requiring that all these antennas undergo an environmental re
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Re:and dog eats tail (Score:4, Insightful)
We know what caused the crash, we do not know what was responsible for the cause. The PTC, however, would have prevented the speed, therefore, the crash.
You don't know that. If the train accelerated out of control because the engineer had a medical event then PTC/ATC would have prevented the crash. If it accelerated out of control because the throttle control system and/or brakes failed then PTC/ATC would not have mattered a whit.
Until we actually know both the how and the why all of these arguments are moot. That's my main point. This is a rush to judgment that's being driven by two factors: The 24 hour cable news cycle (how many different ways can we say, "We don't know anything new yet?") and political interests seeking to advance their cause while the public is paying attention to them.
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The brakes obviously didn't fail since they were applied at the last minute and did manage to scrub about 7 MPH off the speed.
Doubtful that there was any kind of throttle malfunction due to dead man switch technology that has been on trains for decades.
This guy is going to jail absent some very convincing and verifiable reason for ignoring the speed limit.
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We don't know what happened and you're already putting him in handcuffs? Do you not understand what the phrase, "Rush to judgment" means?!
It will take months for the investigation to pan out. Of course, I realize that's beyond the attention span of most people.
Re: and dog eats tail (Score:3)
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Doubtful that there was any kind of throttle malfunction due to dead man switch technology that has been on trains for decades.
That switch controls a throttle system that manages air intake in gas trains, fuel intake in diesel trains, and electricity regulation to the motors in electric rail. If the air or fuel intake sticks open, you get runaway acceleration; if an electrical component shorts or a solid state power MOSFET starts bleeding current, you get excess power to the motors. In that case, your switch might not work, unless it's engineered to cut off some other system--in race cars, the kill switch powers down the fuel pu
Engineers (Score:2)
We obviously failed to pay the Engineer enough money for him to fucking pay attention to the speed limits.
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Anybody blaming the rails for an accident where the train was going double the speed limit has a obvious agenda to blame the nearest deep pocket, non-government corporation and should be ignored _forever after_.
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I'm going to call BS on those costs. In fact, I'm calling BS on many so-called costs related to rail.
My phone, which cost $100 with a $50 a month service plan, can tell me how fast I'm going and what the speed limit is where I'm driving. this stuff stopped being rocket science long ago.
That's the first half of the equation. From there you could make the Cab light up like a Christmas tree and blow a fucking for horn. if you want to get fancier, it could automatically apply the emergency brakes. Fanciest woul
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We care about this not because of the horrific loss of life or because of the ramifications of revealing the US to be a sinking ship of credit downgrades and crumbling infrastructure.
Every time I hear a U.S. official talking about anything these days, I'm reminded of that scene in "Animal House" at the end where Kevin Bacon is desperately trying to calm the panicking crowd by saying "All is well" over and over again.
Hey, isn't Iraq on fire?
All is well.
Hey, aren't we $18 trillion in debt?
All is well.
Hey, isn't there a growing disparity between the rich and poor?
All is well.
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Senators don't ride trains
For 36 years, Senator Joe Biden commuted by Amtrak. If he were still a Senator he'd still be riding the train.
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Re:and dog eats tail (Score:4, Interesting)
yeah how about that, the train passes through the largest city in the state, and it stops there. imagine that, how unusual
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Nobody rides trains.
Hey, I've ridden that train.
It's a reasonable way for getting between Washington and New York, 3 hours and 20 minutes for $86 (vs 2h46 for $158 on the Accela).
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Are you including checkin, security, bag drop/pickup, and getting to and from the airports? Didn't think so.
Re:and dog eats tail (Score:4, Insightful)
They were planted by the Illuminati of course.
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This, and I'm sure the airlines would get along just fine without oil subsidies.
Not to mention the airports which all seem to be publicly funded.
Let's reform the oppressive laws of physics! (Score:4, Funny)
Equality before Equations!! [thepeoplescube.com]:
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No absolute speed governor? (Score:2, Interesting)
The news reports all say the train was traveling over 100 MPH when it hit the curve.
I'm not a train guy, but what's the maximum speed for that entire line? For some reason I'm thinking that line isn't ever supposed to hit that kind of speed and it makes me wonder why those engines don't have a speed governor that keeps the train from ever exceeding the maximum speed allowable across the entire route.
I'd also think that such a governor should be tied to GPS to determine speed and if it can do that, it could
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There are many sections where speeds reach 120mph.
Trains are fast, bro.
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Say what? Airlines get massive subsidies and are in fact less efficient at their jobs than trains.
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Now you are moving the goal posts. You said subsidized.
also Airlines get free security, bailouts, and just general subsidies, without which they would not be able to stay in business and survive on its own.
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Which is why every major airliner (except Southwest) has gone bankrupt in the recent past?
(Also, planes are not always quicker for short distances, if there are actually trains going where you're going.)
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
What I don't understand (Score:2)
Why couldn't the trains simply be equipped with GPS connected to the on-board computers that control the throttle and brakes? Seems like a pretty simple programming exercise to say "hey, our current coordinates indicate the need for reduced speed", then adjust throttle and/or brakes as required. I understand the need for integration into the greater system to prevent accidents from trains following too closely, etc, but even using GPS as a failsafe mechanism could have prevented this derailment.
I was asking
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Unfortunately the railway industry has quite a strange mindset, and is heavily opposed to any kind of innovation. Often this is hiding behind a veil of safety concerns: a new technology will not be adopted unless it can be shown to be perfect. And of course new technology is never perfect, even if it is a lot better than existing solutions.
PTC is a great example of a system at huge expense with rather small benefits. Should it have been adopted? Probably yes - the rest of the world did similar things decade
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If you get into a tunnel GPS signal goes out and your speed control becomes useless, and then you need some other kind of speed control inside tunnels, and once you have implemented that one, the gps one becomes redundant...
And wasting money on redundancy is something CEOs hate.
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Very simple is barcodes on the tracks and a reader. takes less than $500 in parts and is easily retrofitted to even 300 year old rail road lines.
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Lobbying Against PTC (Score:5, Informative)
Wall Street Analyst Encouraged Rail Company to Lobby Against Train Safety Rules
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/15/wall-street-analyst-demanded-rail-industry-invest-lobbying-train-speed-safety-regulations/ [firstlook.org]
By Lee Fang (@lhfang)
05/15/2015 11:26 AM
Positive Train Control, a technology system used to monitor trains and automatically keep them from reaching unsafe speeds, would likely have prevented the tragic Amtrak derailment earlier this week and many other train crashes in recent years, according to the National Transportation Safety Board and train safety experts.
But ever since Congress passed a law in 2008 requiring train companies to implement PTC by the end of 2015, the railroad industry has mounted a ferocious lobbying campaign to delay the rule.
Amtrak, like many other railroads, has been slow to comply. The federal government has been accommodating. And most recently, senators have been fighting primarily over how long an extension should be granted.
Train companies did not want to invest the needed funds to upgrade their systems. But they may have been feeling direct pressure from Wall Street, as well.
In one revealing exchange during an investor call in 2009, Jason Seidl, then a financial analyst with the Dahlman Rose & Co. investment bank, asked Wick Moorman, the chief executive of Norfolk Southern Corp., what “you guys can do in terms of lobbying” on the PTC. And given the costs of complying with the PTC rule, the analyst wanted to know how future investments might be impacted.
Moorman said he and other rail executives were busy working to “educate members of Congress as to what the implications of this legislation are.” Seidl encouraged Moorman to “further educate” them.
Lobbying and other government records show the rail industry extensively sought to influence the Federal Railroad Administration and Congress on the PTC rules. Individual rail companies, including Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, CSX, Canada National Railway Company, among others, hired a small army of lobbyists.
But the largest and most prominent lobbying group to work to delay and weaken the PTC rule was the American Association of Railroads, which employed a veritable who’s who of D.C. consultants and lobbyists, including:
— Linda Daschle, the wife of former Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle, was paid to lobby on the PTC on behalf of the Association of American Railroads.
— The bipartisan lobbying duo of Max Sandlin and Vin Weber, both former congressmen, are registered with the American Association of Railroads to lobby on the PTC. Weber, an advisor to Jeb Bush, is also on the board of the American Action Network, a GOP dark money group that spends millions on election campaigns.
— Another bipartisan lobbying team, including former Sen. John Breaux, D-La., and former Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., is registered to lobby on behalf of the American Association of Railroads on PTC.
— The tax returns for the American Association of Railroads lists SKDKnickerbocker as a consultant for public relations and advertising throughout 2011 and 2012. SKDK is a public affairs firm led by senior Democratic staffers including former White House communications director Anita Dunn and CNN contributor Hilary Rosen. SKDK did not return a call requesting information about what services the firm provided for AAR, or if they continue to count AAR as a client.
— Former National Transportation Safety Board Kathryn Higgins was registered on behalf of AAR to lobby on the PTC.
— Former Rep. William Lipinski, D-Ill., was registered on behalf of the AAR to lobby on PTC. Lipinski’s son Dan is now a member of Congress who serves on the House Transportation Committee.
Engineers have complained about the influence of the train
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In May, the railroads and their regulators learned 565 American Indian tribes had the right to review, one by one, whether 22,000 antennae required for the system to work might be built on sacred ground. That’s as many wireless tower applications as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission approves in two years.
“I’m just speechless,” said Grady Cothen, who retired in 2010 from the Federal Railroad Administration as the deputy associate administrator for safety standards. “I didn’t expect this issue to arise.”
The resulting backup may give railroads including Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe another reason to miss the December 2015 deadline to finish a $13.2 billion project covering one-third of the U.S. rail network.
Re:Lobbying Against PTC (Score:5, Informative)
Replying as anonymous for business reasons...
I worked on the PTC a few years ago with Lockheed Martin and Norfolk Southern. The LM folks were very committed to the program, but NS kept reducing funding. I wont make you read between the lines here, the program was a absolute disaster.
Technologically the solution evolved GPS/Radio units in every train and maintenance vehicle that reported back to a bunker, data center, the trains approximate location, direction, and speed. However because of accuracy issues it was really hard to tell EXACTLY which track a train was on, especially in high density rail yards. So train GPS was supplemented by track circuits which in theory tell you if a train is on a section of track. Which is good in theory, but it can't tell you which train, nor distinguish between maintenance vehicles and trains, nor can it tell you how fast or long a train is.
Knowing how long a train is became important for guaranteeing safe spacing between vehicles, as well as knowing safe times to switch track selectors.
And don't get me started on the software, if anything were ever written by a room full of monkeys it was the PTC software. I recall one function in particular that controlled logic for determining which track a train was likely to be on; when printing out was over 30 foot long. To give you a since of how convoluted that code was, that single function had a McCabe complexity of over 1.5 million.
Now I don't care how brilliant you THINK you are as a programmer, but thinking that you could understand that function only proved to me you were an idiot. 1.5 million possible paths through that one function (yes I know that we didn't account for similar condition statements that artificially inflate that number). That one function is absolutely guaranteed to kill your program, and we stressed that until we were released from the program. Just by odds alone, you are likely to add 5-10 defects while trying to fix a bug in it. And for two solid years that is exactly what happened, the defect count literally oscillated like a sin-wave function.
I'm not telling you this as a slight at the programmers, nor the management. I'm telling you this because a project like PTC is HARD, its like the traveling salesman problem but with 50 salesman who can't be at the same place at the same time, but can pass each-other as needed, are likely going in opposite directions, and you have to recompute the whole mess every 30 seconds and resolve conflicts when a previous solution made the train "jump". Let me tell you there is nothing worse than watching a train make it's way through a switch yard then suddenly jump 10 lanes halfway through on the display.
Wall Street Journal article for non-subscribers (Score:2)
If it doesn't work, clear your system of WSJ cookies and try again.
Media coverage of the Amtrak Derailment (Score:2)
The best reporters learn as they go and become experts on new subjects, if given enough time. The wreck of train 188 turns out to have legs, that is, staying power. The story won’t go away. At this point I think the news organizations are doing a great job, and I salute them.
Yeah, but $ (Score:3)
Going slower means we can't push as many trains through, which means we don't make as much money!
Rolled out intelligently (Score:3)
The PTC system has been rolled out in an intelligent manner, and curves that require breaking got it first. What happened in this particular derailment was an anomaly. Any time a massive new system like this is rolled out, decisions have to be made to prioritize which areas are the highest risk, and thus those areas get the system first. In this particular curve, PTC was installed coming into the curve from the other direction, but not in the direction the train was travelling. Why? Because in the direction the train was travelling, the speed limit from the last stop was never greater than the speed in which the curve could be navigated. The train never needed to slow down into the curve when travelling in that direction. However when coming from the other direction, the train needed to slow from a normal 90+ MPH. Thus PTC was rolled out to make sure trains decelerated because that was the greatest risk.
The train accelerated suddenly within one minute of the crash to that high of a speed, so this wasn't an issue of just negligence and forgetting to brake. The train was accelerated far above the speed limit for no good reason, then the engineer tried to brake at the last second but it was too late.
My hunch is he heard that other engineer in another train talking about being hit by projectiles, and so he sped up to try and make it harder for the engine to get hit, and he misjudged when he needed to slow down to take that curve.
Of course... (Score:2)
What do you expect them to say? But really, the PTC system wasn't turned off for shits and grins. It was still being installed and waiting final calibration and certification. Besides the NTSB is still trying to explain the sudden acceleration (twice) as the train approached the curve. One thought is a software glitch with the onboard system. If that is shown to be the case, then PTC wouldn't make much of a difference.
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A locked cockpit door could have prevented 9/11. Why the rush to create TSA? Because politicians must be seen to do something after a horrible tragedy. Saying, "C'est la vie" and treating us like grown ups would make too much fucking sense.
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I'll bet it costs a bundle to make sure it works as well as it is politically necessary for it to work. It's a matter of marginal costs and benefits. Train travel is already extremely safe; adding safety measures to an already safe mode of travel is bound to be challenging.
Imagine a world where half the train engineers were stoned out of their mind,and train derailments were an everyday occurrence. It would be cheap to design and install a safety system that would be a huge success by cutting down derail
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100mph is to slow, trains are irrelevant because they can not complete due to their lack of speed. Pretty much the rest of the developed word has high speed rail while we lack to political will to deal with the nimbly's. Trains will continue to be irrelevant until they become competitive price/time wise.
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165mph [youtube.com] through Ashford, Kent [google.co.uk].
(I'm sure there are faster examples, and this isn't the top speed of the train, but that could be the track layout rather than the urban area.)
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Almost 1m people PER DAY is almost no one? Also what makes amtrak organisation idiots? Just because you dont like them?
Why dont you go pay for your own raods, schools, airplains and everything else? Because without the infrustructure our nation would not be as great as it is.
Re:Defund Amtrak NOW. (Score:4, Informative)
I don't care how many people per day or per anything else ride the rails - why should I subsidize their ticket prices?
Here's just one article [washingtonpost.com] that talks about the subsidies and where they lie. The northeast regional routes of Amtrak was making over $200 million in profit each year. Once Amtrak became a foster-child of the federal government the federal government started interfering. Most of the money-losing routes that Amtrak operates are there because of demands from local members of Congress in order to gain their support for more subsidies.
Here's another article [bizjournals.com] highlighting that Amtrak's operating law required them to become profitable by 2002. That didn't happen.
Re: (Score:2)
Then remove the requirement for them to have to service the midwest, and that they can service only the areas they want. That is not a problem with amtrak, that is a problem with congress.
Re: (Score:2)
1m per day isn't even remotely close to accurate. They did just shy of 31 million in a year. Just under 85,000 per day.
Re:Defund Amtrak NOW. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why the FUCK are my tax dollars going to support this idiot organization? Why the FUCK are my tax dollars being wasted on a train service that almost no one uses? If some tiny number of dumbasses cannot afford a car or refuse to just because they prefer to eat granola and hug trees, then let them PAY FOR IT THEMSELVES.
Of course, the incompetent democrat in the white houseopposes all common sense, but at least there is one party [cnn.com] working for taxpayers instead of against us.
Instead of defunding Amtrak, maybe it's time to properly fund Amtrak. You seem worried about your tax dollars, but don't seem to mind the billions of them spent on subsidizing air travel and highways and even waterway traffic. What is really lacking in the US is a cohesive transportation policy.
But, hey, it's easier to shout "Defund Amtrak" then it is to actually fix the infrastructure and transportation problems in this country.
Re: (Score:3)
If the drive is 10% of the time lost to using the train then the airport is close. If it's less then 100% of the lost time it's 'close enough'.
In general airports are not subsidized. All the medium to large ones turn profits.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a stupid question because funding did not cause the conductor to turn off the safety mechanism and run the train at 100 mph around a 50 mph bend. It's just ghoulish partisan politicization.