Institutional dysfunction at the FRA and the DOT isn’t exactly a sexy topic for the mainstream press. So kudos to Stephen Smith for publishing a great article in Bloomberg that asks whether the next DOT Secretary can be a technical leader:
David Gunn, the president of Amtrak from 2002 to 2005, cited a lack of technical knowledge as the biggest problem at the Transportation Department, which he said has devolved into “an agency that just distributes money.”
“If you look at the Federal Railroad Administration and the Department of Transportation, they’ve never really had professional leadership,” argued Gunn.
I was thinking about the FRA’s passenger train crash regulations today as I was stopped by a lumbering Amtrak train making its way into Union Station. I told my friend, with whom I was biking and who takes Amtrak several times a year, that instead of investing in crash prevention techniques and technologies, we spend money on building bulkier (read: more materials) trainsets that are less efficient to drag along the tracks to resist the improbable crash with a freight train.