Tag Archives: safety

Freight trains vs. high-speed rail

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The proposals for high-speed rail in the United States include running most high-speed trains on tracks owned by freight train companies. These companies are not thrilled about this arrangement:

But Norfolk Southern Corp., Union Pacific Corp. and other railroad companies are balking at sharing their tracks or rights-of-way with trains that would run between 90 and 200-plus miles an hour. They argue that mixing high-speed passenger trains with slower freight trains would create safety risks, prevent future expansion and cause congestion.

Cargo would be pushed to their competitors—trucking firms—the railroads argue, just as freight loads are picking up after the recession. Weekly average carloads in August were the highest since November 2008, according to the Association of American Railroads, the industry’s main trade group.

My first two thoughts:

1. Is this safety claim legitimate or just a smoke-screen? A lot of arguments about “what the public needs” are often couched in terms of safety to make the argument more appealing.

2. It sounds like the freight companies are protecting their business interests. How does high-speed passenger rail help them? Since they control the necessary infrastructure (the railroad tracks), they have some leverage at this point. Perhaps the two best weapons the federal government has to fight back: public pressure (if the freight companies are seen to be holding this up and this is what the public and/or lots of politicians want, then they will look bad) or perhaps financial incentives (tax breaks?).

Risk of flying in different countries

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A new study suggests flying is more dangerous in the developing world compared to the Western, industrialized world:

Arnold Barnett, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and a researcher on aviation safety, calculated that the odds of dying on a scheduled flight in first world countries such as Canada and Japan are one in 14 million.

But he found that flying in emerging nations such as India and Brazil leads to a one in 2 million chance of death per flight. Lesser developed countries, such as many found in Africa and in Latin America, were found to have a crash rate of one in 800,000.

Overall, Barnett says the data suggests airplane safety around the world is improving. Still, these figures could be frightening to some.

Barnett argues this issues in developing countries might be brought on “individualism and deference to authority.” I recall reading something similar recently that said there were more crashes and issues in an Asian country (perhaps South Korea?) because subordinates (anyone on the plane lower than the pilot) felt they could not challenge the pilot’s authority and therefore would not bring up possible problems if they saw them.

But these figures still obscure the fact that flying in an airplane is relatively safer than a number of other, more frequent activities. Check out this graph from the National Safety Council to see the odds of other activities.