[mjt0229]

I'm no anti-government activist (far from it), and in general, I think safety regulations are a good idea. But I'm having a hard time getting worked up over this. Are the sort of train accidents that this technology would prevent really so frequent or devastating that we should stop everything and fix it? Especially compared to, say, guns, nutrition, pollution, etc? I mean, I'm all for tackling low hanging fruit and making things safer, but I'm not sure how much effort should go into this compared to other safety issues.

[jessriedel]

> So far, railroads have spent more than $2.7 billion on a system estimated to cost $10 billion to $14 billion — plus perhaps $1 billion in annual maintenance. PTC has not been installed, partly because it is not sufficiently developed. CSX Corp., which includes railroads among its assets, says the railroad industry is the nation’s most capital-intensive — and the $11 billion combined capital investments of all U.S. railroads in 2010 were approximately equal to the cost of PTC.

> The Federal Railroad Administration estimates that were PTC to be installed on thousands of locomotives and tens of thousands of miles of track, it would prevent perhaps 2 percent of the approximately 2,000 collisions and derailments, preventing seven deaths and 22 injuries annually.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-positive...

(That quote is the first I could easily find, and it comes from a George Will article. If anyone suspects ideological distortion, I think they could find more objective sources that will say basically the same thing.)

For comparison, the FDA, EPA, and Department of Transportation use ~$9 million for the statistical value of a human life. If it costs more than that to save, it's considered unreasonable and the funds could be better spent elsewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Life_Value_in_th...