Administration sees gap in rail transit oversight
WASHINGTON — There’s virtually no federal safety oversight of subways, light rail and other urban train systems and the Obama administration wants to change that, a transportation official said Tuesday.
Peter Rogoff, the new head of the Federal Transit Administration, said his agency is prohibited by law from establishing any national safety standards, conducting federal inspections or requiring specific operating practices for the local and regional transit agencies that provide more than 3 billion passenger trips by rail a year. Instead, the FTA’s role is primarily to make grants.
Nor is there any other federal agency that sets standards or oversees safety at urban transit systems, Rogoff told the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. The Federal Railroad Administration oversees the safety of freight, long distance and corridor passenger trains, including some commuter trains, but not transit system trains.
“The new administration finds this unacceptable and we expect to propose reforms,” Rogoff said.
The job of overseeing safety at transit agencies has fallen to state and local governments, even though those state safety offices sometimes depend on the transit agencies they oversee for their budgets. On average, one state employee is assigned to oversee safety per local transit agency, Rogoff said
“This is really being treated as a collateral duty” within state oversight agencies, Rogoff said. “This is not a situation we see anywhere else in transportation safety.”
Safety seems to be eroding. The accident rate per 100 million passengers rose from 2.97 in 2003 to 4.19 in 2007, according to FTA data. The frequency of subway collisions and derailments also rose during that period.
Top Transportation Department officials have formed a working group of safety officials and experts to come up with recommendations, which may extend to bus operations as well as rail, Rogoff said.
The American Public Transportation Association, which represents transit agencies, hasn’t taken a position yet on whether FTA should be given safety oversight, said Virginia Miller, a spokeswoman for the association. She said the industry has a good safety record.
“One is 29 times more likely to die from using an automobile than taking public transportation,” Miller said.
Several recent high profile accidents have turned attention to transit safety, including a June 22 subway collision in Washington that killed nine people and injured more than 70.
More than one-third of the trains, equipment and facilities of the nation’s seven largest rail transit agencies are past or near the end of their useful life, and many have components that are defective or may be critically damaged, FTA said in a report released in April.
The agency estimated it will cost $50 billion to bring the rail systems in Chicago, Boston, New York, New Jersey, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Washington into good repair and $5.9 billion a year to maintain them.
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