Presented at the 90th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board
Rail Transit Systems: System Development, Safety, and Reliability
January 26, 2011 | 4:30 pm | Columbia Hall 8: Washington Hilton, Washington DC
In December 2009, the US DOT proposed to establish and enforce minimum Federal safety standards for rail transit systems to correct the status quo condition where 27 separate state programs are responsible for rail safety “resulting in a situation in which there are inconsistent practices and effectiveness”. This short paper conducts a statistical analysis of publicly available safety data to empirically address two questions:
- How safe is rail transit compared with other modes of transport?
- Is there a statistically significant record of inconsistent safety among rail transit agencies?
The analysis finds that travel by rail transit is generally safer than travel by automobile or truck. But, it does find statistically significant long term differences in safety records among the array of domestic heavy rail and light rail operations. However, a detailed review of the findings shows that it is difficult to assign these differences due to inconsistent regulation and enforcement as some of the most profound differences between agencies are found among agencies that operate in the same state under the same regulatory regime. Finally, the analysis found that incident and injury rates are statistically poor predictors of fatality rates. This suggests that rail transit fatalities are so infrequent that existing information concerning rates of incidents and injuries has little or no statistical value in predicting the incidence of fatal accidents. Further statistical analysis of fatality rates might be fruitful.
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