Rogoff: Federal oversight mustn’t push riders onto highways

FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff told Congress that while he believes strongly in greater federal oversight of transit safety, it’s important for that oversight not to diminish the usefulness of transit.

When news first broke that the Obama Administration was seeking a greater federal role in transit safety oversight, I cautioned that such oversight must not repeat the Federal Railroad Administration’s mistakes.

FRA rules forced Acela trainsets to be so heavy they couldn’t operate at originally-planned speeds and later started developing cracks. By focusing on crash survivability instead of crash avoidance, the FRA has limited intercity rail as an alternative to driving in the United States.

Rogoff said that the FTA has no intention of following that path:

We must remember that, despite WMATA’s safety challenges, every Washington area commuter is safer traveling on WMATA than they are traveling on our highways. Thus, we cannot allow any degradation in WMATA’s reliability and performance such that commuters opt to abandon Metro in favor of our already congested highways. We must also caution against any proposals that will reduce significantly WMATA’s existing capacity, forcing more commuters onto our highways. Any actions or proposals pushing WMATA riders onto our highways simply will degrade safety and worsen congestion in the region.

Thanks. As Rogoff would oversee the beginnings of such federal oversight, it’s important for him to set up regulators’ goals appropriately to maximize transit safety in the context of overall commuter safety, making transit safer while ensuring that it doesn’t also make transit worse.