NTSB Official says the accident would not have happened if currently available safety upgrades had been in place, but Congress refuses to fund them

On Tuesday, at least seven people were killed and more than 200 injured when Northeast Regional Train 188, which travels along America’s busiest corridor between Washington, D.C., and New York, derailed while going around a curve in a Philadelphia neighborhood. On Wednesday, House Republicans voted to cut Amtrak’s budget amidst news that proper funding could have enabled the safety features that would have prevented the tragedy altogether.

News broke on Wednesday evening that the Amtrak 188 had been traveling at 106 mph when it entered the curve, which is twice the area’s speed limit of 50 mph. By the time the emergency brakes were applied, the train was only able to slow to 102 mph before going off the rails. In a press conference, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) member Robert Sumwalt said that while most of the Northeastern Corridor’s Amtrak rails are equipped with an advanced technology called “positive train control,” which automatically slows trains that are traveling at too high a rate of speed, this particular bend in Philadelphia was not. Positive train control can overcome human error and prevent derailments due to speed, collisions, and wrong-way trains because of mistakes in track switching. Sumwalt asserted that if the safety mechanism had been in place, “this accident would not have occurred.”

Time and time again we hear the danger of infrastructure deficiencies. The only time politicians seem willing to spend money on America’s crumbling infrastructure is after 80 cars fall into the Mississippi River during a bridge collapse or 25 people die when a freight train and commuter collide head-on. In the case of Amtrak 188, we already have the technology--our representatives just won’t find ways to pay for it. As the New York Times explains,

Part of the issue is that the technology is complex. Basically, positive train control means that locomotives, engineers and train dispatchers have real-time information about train speed and location, and that trains can automatically respond to sensors along the tracks.

The Association of American Railroads argued as early as 2012 that meeting the 2015 deadline would be a challenge for most of its members because of the high cost of the system and the complexity involved in installing and testing it.

Bafflingly, they’re making cuts in the direct aftermath of lives lost. While Congress mandated that positive train control be put in place by 2015, they’re now considering extending the deadline to 2020 because rail companies aren’t able to roll out the costly technology without proper funding. Instead of, as in the past, a reactionary rush to fund old and/or faulty infrastructure, Congress is doing the opposite of what anyone with basic political savvy (or sanity) would expect. (Ironically, the accident comes in the midst of Infrastructure Week, a movement that emphasizes the critical importance of investing in and modernizing America’s infrastructure systems.)

Train travel is the third-safest mode of transportation in the U.S., with air travel and buses in first and second place, respectively. For people commuting on a daily basis, it is far and away a safer option than driving. In the past, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has calculated that if suicides and trespasser-related deaths are removed from the equation, rail transit is responsible for less than 0.1 percent of all transportation-related fatalities in the U.S., or a fatality rate of approximately 0.15 per billion passenger miles. Cars and light trucks, on the other hand, have a fatality rate of 7.28 per billion miles traveled. A total of 13 people died during Amtrak accidents in 2014, while more than 30,000 people died in car crashes in the U.S. in 2014. To put it most simply, riding a train is 23 times safer than driving a car.

When you look at these numbers, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that mass transit saves lives. States with the lowest per capita car fatalities tend to be ones with established public transportation. Judging by the above statistics, the less you travel by car, the better, and according to the American Insurance Institute, the Top 3 safest driving states are Massachusetts, Washington D.C., and New York, which are unsurprisingly all within the territory of the Northeast Corridor. The places that are heavily served by Amtrak are safest for commuters, and yet our country’s legislators refuse to invest in upgrades or even upkeep of the rail system. By Thursday in the Northeast, commuter travel is a nightmare. Thousands of people are left without a way to get to work, and in the coming weeks traffic congestion will be worse than ever as people turn to buses and cars. It’s awful to think that more injuries could come as a result.

Republicans defend Wednesday’s cuts to Amtrak as being a result of sequestration, but rail funding was perceived unimportant long before the sequester started in 2013. Former NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman told the AP, ““For decades we have seen preventable derailments and collisions occur. If we do not implement technology such as PTC to prevent these events, we will continue to see them for the foreseeable future.” Hersman, the president and chief executive of the National Safety Council, continued, “When you consider investment priorities, safety comes last. Unfortunately, it absolutely has to come first.”