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Blaming the Conductor Distracts Us from Seriously Discussing Rail Safety |
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Chatsworth Aftermath
By Damien Goodmon
Since the tragic train accident in Chatsworth, our transportation agencies have succeeded in directing our focus to the actions of the train conductor.
As the leader of the organization that for the past two years has been in a heated battle regarding rail safety with the region’s transportation agencies and the California Public Utilities Commission (the state’s rail regulatory body) this tactic is all too familiar. For nearly every train accident in Southern California, no matter the mode, our transportation agencies insist individuals are to blame – “human error” or “illegal activity” are the terms. Surely, in most train accidents the individual users bare some responsibility, but are they the only culprit?
According to the Federal Railroad Administration Office of Safety Analysis database, from January 1993 through December 2007, 101 people were killed on Metrolink tracks. In this same period of time, despite operating five times more train service than Metrolink, 143 people were fatally wounded on the country’s busiest commuter rail system - New York’s Long Island Rail Road. The result is a fatality rate for Metrolink that is over three times higher than the busiest commuter rail system in the country.
Statistics regarding our region’s light rail system are no more settling. In 2003, USA Today compared the fatalities statistics of our nation’s light rail systems from 1990-2002, with information provided to them by the American Public Transportation Association:
The survey conclusively found that the MTA’s Blue Line had killed nearly three times more people than the second deadliest light rail system in the country. Regardless of whether the system was older and had fewer mitigation measures like the Boston system, or had higher ridership like the San Francisco system, the Blue Line was multiple times more deadly. Twenty-nine people have been added to the Blue Line’s fatality list since the study, so today the number of killed stands at 90.
Given these stats it doesn’t logically follow that user’s behavior is the only reason our region’s transportation agencies operate the deadliest light rail system and one of the deadliest commuter rail systems in the country. Yet that is their claim, and it is all too convenient.
It is convenient because professing the lone-culprit theory for nearly every accident, the train conductor in the case of the Chatsworth accident, and in the past motorists or pedestrians, takes the spotlight off the decision making process, budget allocations, and value placed on rail safety by the politicians who run our rail systems. It allows relative terms used in the rail safety analysis like “cost-effective” and “cost prohibitive” to continue to go unchallenged.
Dismissing the Chatsworth event as a “freak accident” distracts from the hundreds of others that have occurred on our region’s tracks and allows our elected leaders to continue, without appropriate criticism, to translate our region’s desires for solutions to our traffic crisis into policies of building rail quickly, cheaply and unsafely. With policies and decisions to operate commuter trains on single-track segments with freight rail, and 225-ton light rail trains at street level across major intersections right next to large urban schools and churches there is plenty to criticize.
The catastrophic Metrolink accident should be a wake up call to our region. It should result in an independent top-to-bottom no-holds-barred evaluation of the rail safety policies made by the politicians who lead our transportation agencies. The evaluation should result in short-term (1-2 years) and long-term (20-30 year) recommendations … mandates … to implement safety mitigation measures on our rail lines, which must be prioritized among our transportation agencies.
Studying only the conductor’s activities or the Chatsworth accident in isolation is not adequate. It will just doom us to more preventable tragedies.
(Damien Goodmon is the Coordinator of the Citizens’ Campaign to Fix the Expo Rail Line at www.fixexpo.org)
CityWatch
Vol 6 Issue 76
Pub: Sept 19, 2008
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