Fred C. Gamst attends the National Transportation Safety Board's "PTC Symposium" and reports that despite the carriers' position that most accidents on the nation's railroads are caused by human operator error, only one presentation dealt only partially with the human factors of Positive Train Control (PTC).
Fred discovers that the carriers "do not feel comfortable with the train-stop aspect of the PTC technology" because it cannot yet deal as well as a human operator with the wide variety of train behaviors experienced in the real world. The existing attempts to cope with the braking behaviors of different trains also results in a decrease in overall train velocity, yet another cost beyond that of implementation and maintenance. And the estimated cost of a nationwide implementation ($1.2 to $7.8 billion) will require your tax dollar funding, something that the current test projects are already receiving.
Fred outlines some of the ways that, while potentially increasing safety under ideal conditions, new technology like PTC can actually raise new hazards in other situations.
The NTSB is currently lobbying heavily for PTC. Fred points out that even though the agency professes to understand that a system such as PTC, where humans are using and relying on machines, cannot simplistically be divided into human-only and machine-only analyses, that is precisely what they have done at this PTC Symposium.
Editorial comment: Seems to me that PTC can work- if we pass tort reform, get rid of FELA, and get the tax payers to pony up the cash.
Link to Fred's report.
