More stringent regulation is justified no matter what the investigation into the Norfolk Southern derailment finds.
in the middle of Lac-Mégantic, a small village in Canada, killing 47 people and damaging more than 30 buildings, effectively wiping out half of downtown.
The Trump administration then narrowed the regulations further. Obama-era rules had required rail companies to outfit trains carrying crude oil with “electronically controlled pneumatic” brakes that can reduce stopping distances by up to 60 percent. The Republican administration rolled back that measure.
Of course, federal law should not give absolute priority to safety over every other value. Most Americans would not want speed limits on all highways capped at 35 miles an hour, even though this would dramatically reduce road deaths. To the extent that minimizing the risk of rail accidents would require raising shipping costs for distributors — and thus costs for consumers down the supply chain — it is reasonable to ask how we wish to balance safety against efficiency.
Over the past decade, North America’s dominant railways have taken drastic measures to reduce their operational costs, including shedding 30 percent of their employees and establishing a scheduling system that subjects their. This imposed a cost to rail safety, as smaller and less well-rested train crews are liable to miss warning signs of potential accidents. Yet the railways’ labor strategy, among other cost-saving measures, delivered financial benefits, albeit to a narrow constituency.
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