Transportation chief: Agencies struggling to implement safety technology

Transit agencies have struggled to adopt a potentially life-saving train technology because they are often operating on “thin margins,” the head of the Department of Transportation (DOT) said Wednesday.

{mosads}Secretary Anthony Foxx told reporters that he is not satisfied with the rate at which U.S. railroads are implementing Positive Train Control (PTC), which is a system that automatically slows down a train that is going over the speed limit.

But Foxx acknowledged that financial constraints have limited the pace of progress at public transit agencies.

“In the transit agencies, it’s particularly challenging. They’re running their systems at such thin margins that the cost of getting Positive Train Control adopted is significant relative to their budgets,” Foxx said. “That’s not an excuse, that’s just a fact.”

The comments come nearly two weeks after a speeding New Jersey Transit commuter train barreled into the Hoboken station, killing one person and injuring more than 100 others.

Although the cause of the crash is still unknown, the incident has shed a light on the lack of PTC across the nation. The DOT has been pushing for the technology for decades, and President Obama proposed $1.25 billon for PTC in his fiscal 2017 budget request.

Congress originally required all railroads to install the technology by the end of last year, but lawmakers extended the deadline to at least the end of 2018 as railroads struggled to comply with the costly mandate.

The cash-strapped New Jersey Transit has so far made little progress in implementing PTC, while other railroads like Amtrak and BNSF Railway have made far more substantial progress, according to a recent federal report.

The industry predicts that the total cost of implementation could climb to over $10 billion.

Congress has already doled out $650 million in grants since 2008 and provided a $1 billion loan for New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to implement PTC.

Foxx applauded the recent inclusion of $199 million in PTC grants in a surface highway transportation bill but warned: “We sure need a whole lot more in transit agencies across the country to get it done.”