Freedom Line Blog

America as we know it was built largely upon and because of our rail industry, and today it remains a pillar of our economy.

Unfortunately, a destructive proposal before Congress misleadingly named the “Railway Safety Act” (RSA), part of broader surface transportation reauthorization, threatens great harm to our railroads.

Simply put, the bill has nothing to do with improving safety, but has a lot to do with advancing the political agenda of Big Labor.  At a moment when inflation burdens American families and fragile supply chains remain vulnerable to disruption, the last thing our economy or rail sector need is another costly federal mandate imposed upon one of the nation’s most important transportation sectors.

As an initial matter, as noted by The Wall Street Journal, the bill’s “safety” rationalization doesn’t withstand even passing scrutiny.  Over the past two decades alone, rail accident rates have plummeted by 40%, derailments have declined 46% and worker casualty rates have fallen 54%.

That improvement occurred because the private industry invests billions of private dollars every year into infrastructure upgrades, track maintenance, employee training, advanced braking systems, inspection technologies and countless other safety improvements.  Those investments have been facilitated by our existing regulatory framework, which has historically allowed leeway for innovation and operational flexibility, which in turn has allowed those investments to produced a rail network that continues to improve in both safety and efficiency.

The RSA and its proposed bureaucratic mandates, however, would undermine those investments and efforts.

For instance, the RSA would impose sweeping new federal micromanagement of crew sizes, inspections, equipment standards and operational procedures.  Those mandates would in turn saddle rail carriers with enormous compliance costs that ultimately do not disappear into thin air.  Rather, those costs inevitably mean higher prices for consumers, manufacturers, farmers, domestic energy producers and other businesses and industries that depend upon freight rail to move goods affordably across the country.

The bill’s provision requiring that freight trains operate with at least two crew members is among its most pernicious.

In addition to the rail industry’s rapidly improving safety record as noted above, absolutely no evidence suggests that a crew size mandate would do anything other than serve Big Labor’s wish list.

As a leading illustration, the infamous East Palestine, Ohio derailment of February 2023, which proponents of the RSA often cite, actually occurred with a three-person crew.

Additionally, federal reviews conducted in 2016 and 2019, along with the Federal Railroad Administration’s own more recent rulemaking process, found no causal relationship between mandatory crew size and accident reduction.  Yet the RSA would impose a one-size-fits-all staffing mandate anyway, effectively doubling labor costs for numerous freight operations without any demonstrated safety benefit.

That’s not sound public policy.  It’s government-imposed inefficiency.

Worse still, such mandates threaten to freeze innovation precisely when the transportation sector should be embracing it.  Advances in automation, monitoring systems and operational technology continue to improve safety and productivity across industries.  Freight rail should not be locked into outdated federally mandated staffing formulas designed less around safety than around protecting entrenched special interests from technological change.

Indeed, the RSA constitutes an end-around designed to accomplish through federal law what collective bargaining negotiations could not guarantee on their own: a permanently protected employment structure insulated from modernization and competitive pressures.

That approach carries consequences extending far beyond the rail industry itself.

Specifically, freight rail serves as a backbone of interstate commerce and supports millions of American jobs, so policies that reduce operational flexibility, discourage efficiency and increase costs inevitably weaken future investment in infrastructure modernization and network expansion.  Over time, that means slower freight movement, reduced competitiveness and diminished economic growth.

Heavy-handed federal mandates also tend to overlook the practical realities of a geographically vast and operationally diverse rail network.  Conditions vary dramatically across routes, regions and cargo types.  Existing law allows rail operators the flexibility to deploy resources where they make the greatest safety impact, rather than diverting time and money toward regulatory box-checking exercises crafted in Washington.

Congress should pursue transportation policy grounded in evidence, economic reality and genuine safety outcomes — not political theater designed to reward Big Labor.

Accordingly, at a time when Americans already face elevated prices across nearly every sector of the economy, lawmakers should avoid policies that make matters worse, and soundly reject the RSA.

In an interview with CFIF, Marc Sribner, Research Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, discusses transportation safety and security, vehicle automation and self-driving, and airline merger and antitrust nonsense, all in the context of government over-regulation.

Listen to the interview here.

Look!  In the street!  Is it slow?  Is it expensive?  Then it must be a federally subsidized streetcar project!

Randal O’Toole (pdf), a transportation scholar at the Cato Institute, explains how the Obama Administration is literally rewriting the rules to make an inefficient mode of transportation easier to fund:

The Obama administration is currently rewriting the rules for Small Starts [a federal program to subsidize local mass transit projects], and the draft rules, issued January 25, 2012, effectively eliminate the cost-effectiveness requirement.  Instead, the administration proposes to judge projects by how well they promote “livability,” which Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHoood defines as, “If you don’t want an automobile, you don’t have to have one.”  In this case, it evidently also means, “If you don’t want to take a bus, taxpayers will provide an expensive rail alternative.”

Why the need to change the funding criteria?  O’Toole explains:

When the [Federal Transit Administration] applied the [cost-effectiveness] rules to the Small Starts program, however, streetcar advocates complained that the rules discriminated against streetcars because streetcars did not save time.  Instead, advocates argued, the FTA should evaluate streetcars based on their perceived contributions to livability and economic development.

Among other uses “livability” is code for “high density,” a term that translates into smaller living spaces crowded together in apartment buildings instead of single family homes with a yard.

California Governor Jerry Brown is notorious for preaching an “era of limits” that lets the state’s freeway system decay in order to force people into high density housing in the urban core.  With everybody living on top of each other, cars become unfeasible and mass transit suddenly becomes relevant.

But even in this Orwellian vision, streetcars like the ones favored by the Obama administration don’t make economic sense because buses can go faster, seat more people and cost less to operate because they don’t depend on railway lines to move.

No matter.  With the new rules in place 45 cities are lining up to qualify for streetcar subsidies.

If the Feds are paying, who cares about the costs?

The Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) this week joined a coalition of leading free market organizations opposing the federal Black Box Mandate, a provision included in the Senate version of the Highway Bill (SEC. 31406 of S. 1813) that would require all passenger motor vehicles in the United States, beginning with model year 2015, to be fitted with event data recorders (EDRs) that would collect all driving habits of consumers. 

The provision, which is currently being contemplated in a House-Senate conference committee on the Highway Bill, threatens to violate the privacy rights of consumers and burdens manufactures and small businesses with yet another costly, misguided and unnecessary federal mandate.

CFIF is encouraging all of our supporters and activists to visit the coalition website and sign the pledge to their Members of Congress and President Obama “to oppose any federal action to mandate the use of black box data recorders in personal vehicles.”  The pledge goes on to state that the Black Box Mandate:

1. Is an infringement on personal privacy and freedoms. 
2. Would be a slippery slope for Government to track citizen’s transportation habits and location. 
3. Is both an unnecessary expansion of government police power and an undue mandate on consumers and business.

Visit http://www.blackboxmandate.org to sign the pledge now.