by James A. Bacon
There has been increasing interest in passenger rail around the United States in recent years but the high cost of building and operating rail systems has posed a major barrier. One reason rail service is so expensive, writes David Edmondson for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is that Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) safety regulations lock U.S. trains into antiquated standards based on 1945 technology.
FRA regulations require train undercarriages to withstand 800,000 pounds of force without permanent defamation, explains Edmondson in “Reducing Passenger Train Procurement Costs.” The purpose of this “buff strength” requirement is to ensure that train cars can resist the impact of other cars. That may have made sense in 1945 when the standard was implemented, but European and Japanese train design has taken very different directions since then. In Europe train cars are built with crumple zones in non-occupied areas, reducing the need for rigid buff strength of only 337,200 pounds. Not only are European cars just as safe, Edmonson asserts, but trains are lighter, allowing them to decelerate and stop more quickly, and they are less prone to “telescoping,” in which the force of a crash causes passenger cars to climb over one another with devastating effect.
As a result, American trains are more expensive to build, weigh twice as much, require more energy to move, wreak havoc on rail infrastructure built for lighter cars, degrade performance and cost more to operate. Perhaps worst of all, because European (and Japanese) train designs are effectively precluded from the U.S. market, foreign manufacturers anticipate shorter manufacturing runs and charge more per train.
Thus, when Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) purchased trains for its new system in 2009, the least expensive option came from a Japanese coalition that charged 50% more, $3.3 million per unit. When Acela ordered trains from a European consortium, Edmondson contends, the result was a “Frankenstein’s monster” that today faces frequent breakdowns and incurs expensive maintenance.
The FRA, suggests Edmondson, “could easily address this problem by adopting European design standards. This would give U.S. transit agencies access to a vast array of more affordable and effective vehicles. … The FRA should also move beyond crash survival and start to focus on crash prevention. Positive train control, which can significantly reduce the incidence of crashes, is an important piece in this puzzle, but the FRA does not take stopping distance into account when evaluating a train’s safety.” He continues:
The requirements force Amtrak and transit authorities across the country to purchase custom-made trains that are unnecessarily expensive, underperform, and do not meet the best safety practices of the rest of the world.
Bacon’s bottom line:
As I have argued repeatedly, the United States needs to invest in rail mass transit and inter-city rail — but we cannot afford the massive capital and operating subsidies that rail requires. One approach — the brain-dead approach — is simply to lobby for bigger grants and subsidies from federal and state governments whose finances are increasingly precarious and unsustainable. Even if we get the rail service established, if it loses money, there is no assurance that we can maintain it in the future.
A better approach is to understand why rail is so economically uncompetitive. How can taxpayers capture more of the economic value created by their infrastructure investments? How can we reduce union featherbedding and improve labor productivity? And how can we reform federal regulations to encourage more design innovation and promote competition? Edmondson addresses the third of those questions. As a society, we must confront them all. If we don’t re-think passenger rail transportation from stem to stern, rail will never amount to more than a costly, niche transportation option.
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