We should nationalize the railways, then invest in the infrastructure to make it safe to carry freight and passengers. Then allow for competition in the "railway marketplace".
Positive Train Control is the train safety technology at issue here. It isn't ready. The "attempt at crippling the economy" is to shut down instead of operating in violation of the regulation.
The railroad companies claim to have spent billions on implementation but it's not available yet. As the article says, they're not allowed to collaborate or share implementation costs because of trust regulations. Also keep in mind the scale of the deployment. There's hundreds of thousands of cars on the track today, and putting something on each car isn't something that takes an afternoon.
The government can't make it happen by creating a regulation and a deadline.
I don't think they have to put something on every (railroad) car. I think they have to put something on every engine, and on every switch. What they put on every switch has to talk to a network. There's a lot of switches, and some of those switches are in pretty remote places.
> Positive Track Control is the train safety technology at issue here.
I believe it's Positive Train Control.
> The government can't make it happen by creating a regulation and a deadline.
Very much true, and a big surprise to too many regulators.
Also, there's no off-the-shelf version you can buy (this is all new technology), and it has to integrate with other railroads. For example, in the NY Metro area alone, you'd have to integrate the Long Island Railroad, MetroNorth, Conrail, Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and possibly other industrial rail lines I'm not aware of. That alone will take a while to get right.
You are correct, not every car needs to be modified. Generally engines are the primary modification, as is the CAD systems that must accept extra data and pass it to the trains. Things like hotbox detectors that can count trains axels, determine direction plus the switches and track occupation signals need to also be sent from the CAD (which already receives them in controlled territory) to the locomotive itself.
As a point, PTC works in both dark territory and controlled territory, because it focuses on the train itself (but it isn't as reliable in dark territory). Yes in controlled territory it has greater information but it doesn't require every switch to be modified. Even back in the late 90's every controlled switch reported back its status to CAD extremely quickly and CAD could control the switches remotely. Yes, dark territory is different, but PTC had some benefits even in dark territory. It was the long term goal to have near zero dark territory where a switch, siding or other similar factor would be able to cause a collision.
And just as a point, even when a train leaves one CAD controlled territory (say Union Pacific territory) and enters another (say ran by BNSF) the CAD operators hand off control, much like air traffic control. So the issue of interoperability is minimal as it already is in place in at least a fairly common form. Not saying it isn't without fault or couldn't be better, but the world doesn't have to change overnight, just keep making progress on each part making it better and better.
I think dark territory means unmonitored sections of track or switches (to be more precise, I guess), that which isn't yet hooked up to the system to watch for speed and other issues that would cause accidents? New to me too :)
Computer aided dispatch. Essentially all trains are monitored via control centers owned by a few of the larger railroads. Passenger traffic is even handed off through these centers when crossing the territories.
And yes dark territory is what they call the areas that are unmonitored. Usually these are way out in the middle of no where on single track. Most monitoring believe it or not is hard wired and not wireless. For example, hot box detectors which are basically buried on the inside of the tracks monitor a trains bearing/axel temperatures and can report if one is over heating. This is critical because it is a source of derailments. Those boxes though usually are wired directly to lines running along the track and back to a common point. In many cases a number of lines terminate at one location and are fed to radio towers that beam that data back. In other cases it follows the fiber all the way to a rail yard or dispatch center.
I can't say now what the differences are with PTC in Europe, but I know when I was at GE we looked a lot at what they were doing because in most cases they are far more serious about their railroads.
Ummmmm, having been one of the original architects for GE on their CAD and PTC systems in the late 90's I have to disagree. The technology is pretty solid, the implementations even by competing companies are reasonable as well. The issues are political and liability, but frankly the claims are totally exaggerated on the cost, this is more about limiting future liability and changing a very ingrained old school culture. PTC helps to provide positive proof of negligence (or the lack thereof), which as you can imagine can generate potential liability for a railroad. PTC is not overriding of a train operator in all circumstances, hence the liability. And the train operator and general culture is VERY rooted, even more so than the automotive industry, which means moving these long timers off the ball takes way more than some government deadline.
As for not sharing costs, that is complete crap. The railroads are not developing the technology anyway, companies like GE and others have developed it and are continuing to develop it. Even interoperation between competing implementations is mostly moot. The railroads have to pay for the software, maintenance and on-going updates, but the development is coming from outside the railroads so that political BS claim is just that.
Not saying everything is perfect, but it frustrates me that after 15 years this isn't done and implemented, its 10 years beyond when I thought at least 2 of the biggest railroads would have it deployed at least in some form. Hell in 1998 GE had forms of it in test at 2 of the largest railroads in the country.
Hmm how about nationalizing the infrastructure, mandate safety technologies and allow private companies to compete on common grounds to prevent a race to the bottom?
Not the entire companies, just the part that could boost competition and innovation by nationalizing and opening it up. Aren't Amtrak trains regularly prioritized far beyond freight trains, resulting in a massive problem for passenger train service?
Not sure what you're saying here? Amtrak service is notoriously terrible and technologically backwards, which does not strike me as a good argument for having the US government nationalize an industry.
There's a shitload of stuff to compete on when you don't own the railroads.
Pricing (hello Deutsche Bahn, 10x more expensive than buses LOL), service (thumbs up to Austria's Westbahn here), quality of the carriages (again, thumbs up to Westbahn, displacing even the DB ICE trains), WiFi...
I don't see how this would be any different than trucking companies competing on public roads. There is certainly competition in that industry. Are there regions where two railroad (companies) have built competing infrastructure?
It wouldn't be different than trucking companies competing on public roads. But a "trucking on rails" company would be very different from a railroad, for the same reason that a trucking company is different from a toll road.
(I know, the analogy isn't perfect. Still, I would guess that 90% of a railroad's capital is tied up in track, right of way, signaling, and similar stuff, and only 10% in engines and cars. Saying "let's nationalize the infrasturcture" means nationalizing almost all of the railroad company. Hence my comment that "there's not much left". Your distinction between nationalizing all the company and nationalizing "just the infrastructure" is not much of a difference.)
BNSF has about 85% of their revenue in the tracks and 15% in the trains so your guess isn't far off.
Can you comment on competition for a given route in the current railroad model? I assume railroads control who uses their tracks so they can prevent competitors from serving those routes, is that the case and how does that not constitute some form of monopoly?
Edit: Thank you for the clarification, I had no idea how much railroads had tied up in the infrastructure. It seems that much of the value of a railroad is on the ability to serve certain routes without competition which in hindsight is pretty obvious.
Let's define the "route" to be Chicago to Los Angeles. UP and BNSF both serve that route (with different tracks). NS and CSX don't serve that route, because they have no tracks out there.
Now take the route from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Los Angeles. BNSF is the only one who serves that route, because they're the only railroad that has tracks to Flagstaff. So BNSF has a monopoly on railroad service to Flagstaff.
But the fact is, there's not enough railroad traffic that originates in Flagstaff to make it economically worthwhile to have two different rail lines.
And in fact, this kind of "monopoly" has always been an issue with rail service. If you have a factory in Chicago, there were something like 18 different railroads that served Chicago back in the day, but only one of them had a track to your door. So you only had one choice for your factory, even though there were 18 railroads in town.
On the other hand: That railroad had a monopoly on your rail service because they built a track to your door (at their expense), and the other 17 railroads didn't. So I have a hard time getting too upset about this kind of "monopoly" as any kind of unfairness.
The fact is, though, the main railroad competition is trucks, not other railroads. (Also barges, for low-speed bulk stuff.) And the trucks (and barges) are running on highways (and waterways) paid for with taxes (including the truck's gasoline taxes), whereas the railroads are paying for their track (and paying taxes on it).
Thank you again for your detailed replies, I don't know much about our rail infrastructure but it is interesting.
Can you explain what the taxes are for on the rail lines?
In your example could the customer build their own small rail lines to meet up with the existing tracks of BNSF and UP both to allow them to pick who they use to haul freight between Chicago and LA? Does that happen?
I am reminded of a plant tour at a major manufacturer where they had a rail line that ran right into their factory to deliver raw materials, I wonder who owns the rails.
Do railroads have a anything similar to the meet up rooms in carrier hotels where you can move from one rail network to another?
> Can you explain what the taxes are for on the rail lines?
I know they pay property taxes on the land (plus the value of what's on the land). I don't know how much that is, but it's different from a government-owned highway, which pays no taxes.
> In your example could the customer build their own small rail lines to meet up with the existing tracks of BNSF and UP both to allow them to pick who they use to haul freight between Chicago and LA? Does that happen?
There are two parts to the answer here. First, yes, sometimes shippers build a rail line to connect to an existing railroad. Sometimes shippers have their own locomotives to move cars on their track, too.
Second, connecting to two different railroads. This only works (economically) if the two railroads are close to each other. Around Chicago, say, it's easy. In Nevada, not so much. You might have to build two hundred miles of track to get a connection to a different railroad. No matter how bad the freight rates are from the railroad you've got, it's not worth it.
> Do railroads have a anything similar to the meet up rooms in carrier hotels where you can move from one rail network to another?
I'm not sure what "meet up rooms in carrier hotels" are, but yes, railroads have places where traffic moves from one railroad to another.
Thing is, freight trains are a far better use of the track than passenger trains: the system is ideal for slow-moving bulk cargo that doesn't care if it has to sit on a siding for a week, not to mention that it's a much less damaging way of moving heavy material around than trucks. Passengers, meanwhile, want to go specific places at specific times, and that just does not coexist well with freight. Better for passengers to travel by air, private car, dedicated high-speed rail, and other systems focused on the job.
This argument neglects the fact that the railroads have no problem moving high-priority Z trains just fine.
If UPS can ship Amazon prime packages overnight via rail, I have a hard time buying the argument that I should be taking a flight from Portland to Vancouver because the system can't handle it.
"High priority Z trains" still take three to six days to get to their destination. Freight schedules are unpredictable, and that's fine, because freight doesn't care. Passengers do care.
> I have a hard time buying the argument that I should be taking a flight from Portland to Vancouver because the system can't handle it.
Do you really want to sit overnight from Portland to Vancouver on a train as opposed to flying there in an hour and twenty minutes? Most people don't.
This could come from the fact that the freight lines own much of the track that Amtrak runs on. If I owned and managed a rail line and had to chose which train got the priority: mine, or Amtrak...
IT, and well, the governments up to now have done a relatively well job in the sector by providing a framework where small-scale startups can compete on fair terms with big monopolies (just look how big Cloudflare grew). Then again, the tide seems to turn a bit, I'm not exactly sure.
I'm not an American, but aren't the railways in the US split up in dozens of small-ish companies (forming local monopolies), each with own regulations etc.?
Each company owns tracks which sometimes gets used by other companies. Cars are handed off and often owned by non-railroads. Its a complex system but each company acts pretty much the same way so for example "bills of lading" act the same. They don't have their own regulations. Calling them monopolies if far from the truth, and they do an efficient job of hauling cargo like they were designed to do.
People are not meant to be hauled by the modern US railroad. They made different decisions in Europe. To give a technology analogy: Stop trying to use COBOL to write Fortran programs.
In the US and Canada, there are 7 major railroads: BNSF, Union Pacific, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, and Kansas City Southern (there's also Via Rail and Amtrak, the passenger trains of Canada and the US, but they are generally excluded).
In effect, there are basically three separate market duopolies: in the west, you have a choice between UP and BNSF; in the east, NS and CSX; and in the north, CN and CP. On top of this, there's a few hundred smaller railroads that are much more local in scope.
For a route from city A to city B that can be served by BNSF do consumers have a choice of a second railroad? If the answer to that is mostly no doesn't BNSF have some form of monopoly on rail transport?
Thanks for the map. I see that many of these routes are only served by one railroad. For example, how does BNSF not have a monopoly on the route from Moorhead to Brainerd?
How common are track sharing and common transport agreements?
"Moorhead to Brainerd" - I hire a truck (for that short of distance no one on this planet would use a railroad) or my cars go from railroad to railroad. Yes, for little stretches monopolies exist but no railroad company is an island they do route stuff across rail. Saying BNSF is a monopoly because of small patches like that is saying you have a monopoly on parking in your driveway. Heck, many non-rail companies own a lot of rail cars.
Rail competes and works with truck, barge, and air. The US is blessed with a lot of competitive options for transporting goods.
My only beef with BNSF is their continuing attempts to lobby for no more pipelines because of all the money they are making from oil in ND. BNSF needs to review its safety policies but the two ND Senators (one from each party) are keeping up the pressure on that front.
Let's privatize the system of roads - but in such a way that trucking companies are encouraged to build their own road system, and access to infrastructure is largely given only in exchange for access to other infrastructure.
In Germany, it does - DB Netz, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn, gets huge amounts of funds for infrastructure maintenance and construction, and the competition building on said rail infrastructure slowly begins to manifest.
> Does the government currently subsidize railroad maintenance and/or construction?
Not in the US, except to the degree that government transportation agencies use the tracks of private railroads (not the norm, but it happens) or own them (Amtrak owns the Northeast Corridor, very little anywhere else.
Nationalized railways are the norm rather than the exception in much of the world. Interestingly enough, the US has a much higher fraction of freight traffic move by rail than most of those with nationalized railways.
I think this is largely due to the greater shipping distances (rail gets cheaper relative to trucking as the distances gets greater), and maybe a bit the lack of interference from passenger rail.
Btw, in Europe many networks are state owned, some are privately owned. By open-access regulation forces every track-owner to open their tracks for a fee to other operators. There's also a distinction between track-owners and track-operators, even if a single company may be both.
The article quotes AAR spokesman Ed Greenburg as "We have been warning for years that the deadline was unworkable because the technology had to be developed from scratch."
Why does such technology need to be developed from scratch? Positive Train Control sounds very similar to the in-cab signalling schemes (European Train Control System) in use in Europe on the Eurostar and other high-speed lines, and is continuing to roll out on other lines, would adapting that technology not make a good start?
It seems most of the world is moving towards ERTMS. The 'not-invented-here' syndrome is strong in the US. But there may also be compatibility issues, in the US they have a completely different view of railroad safety (laregly boils down to 'if there's an accident, our trains should be built like tanks so it doesn't matter' vs 'there should never be railroad accidents'). That's one of the reasons why there is very little transit on main lines.
I'm no anti-government activist (far from it), and in general, I think safety regulations are a good idea. But I'm having a hard time getting worked up over this. Are the sort of train accidents that this technology would prevent really so frequent or devastating that we should stop everything and fix it? Especially compared to, say, guns, nutrition, pollution, etc? I mean, I'm all for tackling low hanging fruit and making things safer, but I'm not sure how much effort should go into this compared to other safety issues.
> So far, railroads have spent more than $2.7 billion on a system estimated to cost $10 billion to $14 billion — plus perhaps $1 billion in annual maintenance. PTC has not been installed, partly because it is not sufficiently developed. CSX Corp., which includes railroads among its assets, says the railroad industry is the nation’s most capital-intensive — and the $11 billion combined capital investments of all U.S. railroads in 2010 were approximately equal to the cost of PTC.
> The Federal Railroad Administration estimates that were PTC to be installed on thousands of locomotives and tens of thousands of miles of track, it would prevent perhaps 2 percent of the approximately 2,000 collisions and derailments, preventing seven deaths and 22 injuries annually.
(That quote is the first I could easily find, and it comes from a George Will article. If anyone suspects ideological distortion, I think they could find more objective sources that will say basically the same thing.)
For comparison, the FDA, EPA, and Department of Transportation use ~$9 million for the statistical value of a human life. If it costs more than that to save, it's considered unreasonable and the funds could be better spent elsewhere.
In the Chicago area, the Metra commuter rail system was saying they would have to discontinue service at the end of the year if the PTC requirement wasn't delayed due to their delays in getting it implemented. It isn't just freight lobbying.
>> In the Chicago area, the Metra commuter rail system was saying they would have to discontinue service at the end of the year if the PTC requirement wasn't delayed due to their delays in getting it implemented. It isn't just freight lobbying.
Does that mean they'd go bankrupt? Could someone then buy them for cheap and implement PTC and take over the business? Sometimes it's nice to entertain the idea of "let them fail".
Nope. Commuter service in Chicago is contracted out to big players like BNSF and Union Pacific. If they were to lose the contract to run Metra trains, they would be fine.
And it's not like there's some other company or agency waiting to make PTC happen for millions instead of billions.
This sounds callous, but 245 deaths in 45 years isn't that bad.
Yes, of course I would like safer trains. I would like safer lots of things, especially cars, because so many more people have car accidents and die each year.
Ideally, our government would calculate lives per year saved versus cost for all kinds of proposed laws and regulations. And then we could more fairly decide which things to implement first, based on which would save the most lives.
This requires us to place a specific dollar figure on a human life, which everyone seems reluctant to do.
The government puts a specific dollar figure on human life all the time. It's not afraid to do that.
But positive train control isn't just about improving safety. It's part of a larger overhaul of the rail system that will allow increased efficiency. E.g. the Acela is much heavier than European passenger trains because of FRA crash standards. If PTC succeeds in reducing the likelihood of crashes and derailments, those regulations could be loosened, allowing lighter and faster trains.
The government puts a specific dollar figure on human life all the time. It's not afraid to do that.
I disagree with that, at least with regards to the USA. Does Congress pass a resolution every year that dictates what a human life is worth? Something that is applied across the board for all legislation, rather than buried deep in the implications of whatever law they're talking about now?
Based off that, you ought to be willing to spend $1.543 billion to save those 245 lives. The railroads are claiming that they've spent billions attempting to prepare this technology.
If they're accurately representing the costs (big if!), this doesn't sound like it meets the government's own cost-benefit standards, so I'd like to hear more about the rationale behind requiring this technology.
"The EPA does not place a dollar value on individual lives. Rather, when conducting a benefit-cost analysis of new environmental policies, the Agency uses estimates of how much people are willing to pay for small reductions in their risks of dying from adverse health conditions that may be caused by environmental pollution."
"In the scientific literature, these estimates of willingness to pay for small reductions in mortality risks are often referred to as the "value of a statistical life.” This is because these values are typically reported in units that match the aggregate dollar amount that a large group of people would be willing to pay for a reduction in their individual risks of dying in a year, such that we would expect one fewer death among the group during that year on average."
"EPA recommends that the central estimate of $7.4 million ($2006), updated to the year of the analysis, be used in all benefits analyses that seek to quantify mortality risk reduction benefits regardless of the age, income, or other population characteristics of the affected population."
"We would never dream of placing a dollar value on human life. Therefore, we don't call it that!"
(FWIW, placing a dollar value on life is absolutely necessary in order for any kind of sane optimization, so I completely sympathize with having to use the clever packaging.)
The nature of technology, and how it's approached, is a pretty fascinating study of and by itself. I've been reading a number of authors on this, off and on, for a few decades (some before I fully realised I was doing so). Included: James Burke, Charles Perrow, W. Brian Arthur, Kevin Kelley, Thomas Kuhn, and Joseph Tainter.
The idea that techology is welcomed with open arms is among many false beliefs. Luddite companies (or countries) are far more influential than individuals, workers, or citizens, often dressing their actions in FUD, regulatory opposition (as here), or buying up (and destroying) competition.
The truth is that companies are interested in promoting their own technologies, where this provides them with some compelling advantage (usually market segmentation, control, or barriers). What they oppose are requirements to adopt technologies imposed externally, or development of disruptive technologies which, again, generally attack their own market interests and/or power.
You need to keep in mind that US highways, as opposed to interstate highways, tend to be roads of secondary importance these days. In the Los Angeles area, for example, a lot of the formerly federal highways became state highways after they were built up to freeway standards, due to various complicated political reasons. Additionally, there are plenty of stretches of US33 which are full divided highways, looking a lot like https://goo.gl/maps/6vc73fZ9nTz. In comparison, Swedish route 34 looks like https://goo.gl/maps/Ur45ukH7Yop outside of town. So both roads are pretty much the same, all things considered, gaining and losing features as the local traffic conditions call for them.
Thankfully improvements in rail architecture could happen while improvements elsewhere are made. While ideally it would be nice to instantly prioritize which is most important to budget for, etc. Starting somewhere will be better than spending 50 years arguing budget.
Japan has had only 5 deaths in the past 45~ years with far more train operation and having bullet trains. With the only fatal occurrence happening due to an earthquake.
(Pre-1960's had only a few accidents, though high fatalities...)
In 2005, the Amagasaki rail crash [0] claimed 107 lives. This was a significant disaster and puts the lie to your claim that Japan has had only 5 deaths due to train accidents in approximately the last 45 years.
Crap, I missed one... I had checked all of the crashes, as I know Japanese trains are among the safest in the world. By the time I had reached the end of the list it seems I forgot Amagasaki. Thanks for the correction - but lie implies intention. I had no intention of misrepresenting the facts.
I think you are placing far too much faith in the power of one actor vs. The fact this has been a Democratic base purity test for a few years. Plus crude-over-rail is barely 10% of all oil movement (vs. Pipelines).
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 92.1 ms ] threadThe railroad companies claim to have spent billions on implementation but it's not available yet. As the article says, they're not allowed to collaborate or share implementation costs because of trust regulations. Also keep in mind the scale of the deployment. There's hundreds of thousands of cars on the track today, and putting something on each car isn't something that takes an afternoon.
The government can't make it happen by creating a regulation and a deadline.
edit: Fixed definition of PTC.
> Positive Track Control is the train safety technology at issue here.
I believe it's Positive Train Control.
> The government can't make it happen by creating a regulation and a deadline.
Very much true, and a big surprise to too many regulators.
As a point, PTC works in both dark territory and controlled territory, because it focuses on the train itself (but it isn't as reliable in dark territory). Yes in controlled territory it has greater information but it doesn't require every switch to be modified. Even back in the late 90's every controlled switch reported back its status to CAD extremely quickly and CAD could control the switches remotely. Yes, dark territory is different, but PTC had some benefits even in dark territory. It was the long term goal to have near zero dark territory where a switch, siding or other similar factor would be able to cause a collision.
And just as a point, even when a train leaves one CAD controlled territory (say Union Pacific territory) and enters another (say ran by BNSF) the CAD operators hand off control, much like air traffic control. So the issue of interoperability is minimal as it already is in place in at least a fairly common form. Not saying it isn't without fault or couldn't be better, but the world doesn't have to change overnight, just keep making progress on each part making it better and better.
What are the differences between the US PTC systems and the systems used in Europe?
And yes dark territory is what they call the areas that are unmonitored. Usually these are way out in the middle of no where on single track. Most monitoring believe it or not is hard wired and not wireless. For example, hot box detectors which are basically buried on the inside of the tracks monitor a trains bearing/axel temperatures and can report if one is over heating. This is critical because it is a source of derailments. Those boxes though usually are wired directly to lines running along the track and back to a common point. In many cases a number of lines terminate at one location and are fed to radio towers that beam that data back. In other cases it follows the fiber all the way to a rail yard or dispatch center.
I can't say now what the differences are with PTC in Europe, but I know when I was at GE we looked a lot at what they were doing because in most cases they are far more serious about their railroads.
As for not sharing costs, that is complete crap. The railroads are not developing the technology anyway, companies like GE and others have developed it and are continuing to develop it. Even interoperation between competing implementations is mostly moot. The railroads have to pay for the software, maintenance and on-going updates, but the development is coming from outside the railroads so that political BS claim is just that.
Not saying everything is perfect, but it frustrates me that after 15 years this isn't done and implemented, its 10 years beyond when I thought at least 2 of the biggest railroads would have it deployed at least in some form. Hell in 1998 GE had forms of it in test at 2 of the largest railroads in the country.
The railroads have been dragging their feet on this and should get fined. A lot.
Pricing (hello Deutsche Bahn, 10x more expensive than buses LOL), service (thumbs up to Austria's Westbahn here), quality of the carriages (again, thumbs up to Westbahn, displacing even the DB ICE trains), WiFi...
(I know, the analogy isn't perfect. Still, I would guess that 90% of a railroad's capital is tied up in track, right of way, signaling, and similar stuff, and only 10% in engines and cars. Saying "let's nationalize the infrasturcture" means nationalizing almost all of the railroad company. Hence my comment that "there's not much left". Your distinction between nationalizing all the company and nationalizing "just the infrastructure" is not much of a difference.)
According to http://www.bnsf.com/about-bnsf/financial-information/form-10...
BNSF has about 85% of their revenue in the tracks and 15% in the trains so your guess isn't far off.
Can you comment on competition for a given route in the current railroad model? I assume railroads control who uses their tracks so they can prevent competitors from serving those routes, is that the case and how does that not constitute some form of monopoly?
Edit: Thank you for the clarification, I had no idea how much railroads had tied up in the infrastructure. It seems that much of the value of a railroad is on the ability to serve certain routes without competition which in hindsight is pretty obvious.
Now take the route from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Los Angeles. BNSF is the only one who serves that route, because they're the only railroad that has tracks to Flagstaff. So BNSF has a monopoly on railroad service to Flagstaff.
But the fact is, there's not enough railroad traffic that originates in Flagstaff to make it economically worthwhile to have two different rail lines.
And in fact, this kind of "monopoly" has always been an issue with rail service. If you have a factory in Chicago, there were something like 18 different railroads that served Chicago back in the day, but only one of them had a track to your door. So you only had one choice for your factory, even though there were 18 railroads in town.
On the other hand: That railroad had a monopoly on your rail service because they built a track to your door (at their expense), and the other 17 railroads didn't. So I have a hard time getting too upset about this kind of "monopoly" as any kind of unfairness.
The fact is, though, the main railroad competition is trucks, not other railroads. (Also barges, for low-speed bulk stuff.) And the trucks (and barges) are running on highways (and waterways) paid for with taxes (including the truck's gasoline taxes), whereas the railroads are paying for their track (and paying taxes on it).
Can you explain what the taxes are for on the rail lines?
In your example could the customer build their own small rail lines to meet up with the existing tracks of BNSF and UP both to allow them to pick who they use to haul freight between Chicago and LA? Does that happen?
I am reminded of a plant tour at a major manufacturer where they had a rail line that ran right into their factory to deliver raw materials, I wonder who owns the rails.
Do railroads have a anything similar to the meet up rooms in carrier hotels where you can move from one rail network to another?
I know they pay property taxes on the land (plus the value of what's on the land). I don't know how much that is, but it's different from a government-owned highway, which pays no taxes.
> In your example could the customer build their own small rail lines to meet up with the existing tracks of BNSF and UP both to allow them to pick who they use to haul freight between Chicago and LA? Does that happen?
There are two parts to the answer here. First, yes, sometimes shippers build a rail line to connect to an existing railroad. Sometimes shippers have their own locomotives to move cars on their track, too.
Second, connecting to two different railroads. This only works (economically) if the two railroads are close to each other. Around Chicago, say, it's easy. In Nevada, not so much. You might have to build two hundred miles of track to get a connection to a different railroad. No matter how bad the freight rates are from the railroad you've got, it's not worth it.
> Do railroads have a anything similar to the meet up rooms in carrier hotels where you can move from one rail network to another?
I'm not sure what "meet up rooms in carrier hotels" are, but yes, railroads have places where traffic moves from one railroad to another.
If UPS can ship Amazon prime packages overnight via rail, I have a hard time buying the argument that I should be taking a flight from Portland to Vancouver because the system can't handle it.
> I have a hard time buying the argument that I should be taking a flight from Portland to Vancouver because the system can't handle it.
Do you really want to sit overnight from Portland to Vancouver on a train as opposed to flying there in an hour and twenty minutes? Most people don't.
People are not meant to be hauled by the modern US railroad. They made different decisions in Europe. To give a technology analogy: Stop trying to use COBOL to write Fortran programs.
In effect, there are basically three separate market duopolies: in the west, you have a choice between UP and BNSF; in the east, NS and CSX; and in the north, CN and CP. On top of this, there's a few hundred smaller railroads that are much more local in scope.
[edit: also remember track sharing and common transport agreements]
How common are track sharing and common transport agreements?
AnimalMuppet did a great job answering the monopoly question elsewhere in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10510522
Rail competes and works with truck, barge, and air. The US is blessed with a lot of competitive options for transporting goods.
My only beef with BNSF is their continuing attempts to lobby for no more pipelines because of all the money they are making from oil in ND. BNSF needs to review its safety policies but the two ND Senators (one from each party) are keeping up the pressure on that front.
I don't know enough about how the railroads work to comment on how feasible such an arrangement would be.
Does the government currently subsidize railroad maintenance and/or construction?
Edit: Is there a precedent anywhere else in the world for nationalized railways?
Not in the US, except to the degree that government transportation agencies use the tracks of private railroads (not the norm, but it happens) or own them (Amtrak owns the Northeast Corridor, very little anywhere else.
Btw, in Europe many networks are state owned, some are privately owned. By open-access regulation forces every track-owner to open their tracks for a fee to other operators. There's also a distinction between track-owners and track-operators, even if a single company may be both.
Why does such technology need to be developed from scratch? Positive Train Control sounds very similar to the in-cab signalling schemes (European Train Control System) in use in Europe on the Eurostar and other high-speed lines, and is continuing to roll out on other lines, would adapting that technology not make a good start?
> The Federal Railroad Administration estimates that were PTC to be installed on thousands of locomotives and tens of thousands of miles of track, it would prevent perhaps 2 percent of the approximately 2,000 collisions and derailments, preventing seven deaths and 22 injuries annually.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-positive...
(That quote is the first I could easily find, and it comes from a George Will article. If anyone suspects ideological distortion, I think they could find more objective sources that will say basically the same thing.)
For comparison, the FDA, EPA, and Department of Transportation use ~$9 million for the statistical value of a human life. If it costs more than that to save, it's considered unreasonable and the funds could be better spent elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Life_Value_in_th...
Does that mean they'd go bankrupt? Could someone then buy them for cheap and implement PTC and take over the business? Sometimes it's nice to entertain the idea of "let them fail".
And it's not like there's some other company or agency waiting to make PTC happen for millions instead of billions.
Yes, of course I would like safer trains. I would like safer lots of things, especially cars, because so many more people have car accidents and die each year.
Ideally, our government would calculate lives per year saved versus cost for all kinds of proposed laws and regulations. And then we could more fairly decide which things to implement first, based on which would save the most lives.
This requires us to place a specific dollar figure on a human life, which everyone seems reluctant to do.
But positive train control isn't just about improving safety. It's part of a larger overhaul of the rail system that will allow increased efficiency. E.g. the Acela is much heavier than European passenger trains because of FRA crash standards. If PTC succeeds in reducing the likelihood of crashes and derailments, those regulations could be loosened, allowing lighter and faster trains.
I disagree with that, at least with regards to the USA. Does Congress pass a resolution every year that dictates what a human life is worth? Something that is applied across the board for all legislation, rather than buried deep in the implications of whatever law they're talking about now?
If they're accurately representing the costs (big if!), this doesn't sound like it meets the government's own cost-benefit standards, so I'd like to hear more about the rationale behind requiring this technology.
"The EPA does not place a dollar value on individual lives. Rather, when conducting a benefit-cost analysis of new environmental policies, the Agency uses estimates of how much people are willing to pay for small reductions in their risks of dying from adverse health conditions that may be caused by environmental pollution."
"In the scientific literature, these estimates of willingness to pay for small reductions in mortality risks are often referred to as the "value of a statistical life.” This is because these values are typically reported in units that match the aggregate dollar amount that a large group of people would be willing to pay for a reduction in their individual risks of dying in a year, such that we would expect one fewer death among the group during that year on average."
"EPA recommends that the central estimate of $7.4 million ($2006), updated to the year of the analysis, be used in all benefits analyses that seek to quantify mortality risk reduction benefits regardless of the age, income, or other population characteristics of the affected population."
(FWIW, placing a dollar value on life is absolutely necessary in order for any kind of sane optimization, so I completely sympathize with having to use the clever packaging.)
A related example would be which of these two road that are better suited for self-driving cars or similar technologies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US33SEOH.JPG
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MMLNorr1.JPG
The idea that techology is welcomed with open arms is among many false beliefs. Luddite companies (or countries) are far more influential than individuals, workers, or citizens, often dressing their actions in FUD, regulatory opposition (as here), or buying up (and destroying) competition.
The truth is that companies are interested in promoting their own technologies, where this provides them with some compelling advantage (usually market segmentation, control, or barriers). What they oppose are requirements to adopt technologies imposed externally, or development of disruptive technologies which, again, generally attack their own market interests and/or power.
Japan has had only 5 deaths in the past 45~ years with far more train operation and having bullet trains. With the only fatal occurrence happening due to an earthquake.
(Pre-1960's had only a few accidents, though high fatalities...)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Derailments_in_Japan
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_rail_crash
edit: changed "death" to "deaths due to train accidents"