The MT Position

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit magazine

Time is interesting. Many people spend each day watching the clock tick off the minutes as they wish they were anywhere but at their job. But as slowly as the work week crawls, the weekends seem way too short. Of course, anyone who is preparing for the upcoming Expo can tell you, time is definitely flying by.

If you’re even remotely interested in public transit, you heard about the Metrolink accident this week. In fact, it’s taken most of the week for the news about it to die down. The newswire on Monday was inundated by stories about the tragedy from any number of angles.

Time for the people in California must have crawled this week as the entire nation shifted its focus in their direction for a few days. And well they should. This tragedy was preventable on a number of levels and though it may well be forgotten about under the “human error” classification in the future, the transit industry should asterisk that note and make sure we let it be known this did not need to happen.

Of course, the media is all over the story. Tragedy will do that. Unfortunately, the national media seems hyper-focused on positive train control (PTC) as the one and only way of solving this problem. I’ve seen more CGI renditions of PTC in the last week than I’ve ever seen before.

But, much like many other stories that catch the national media’s attention, this story will pass by quickly as the new “hot” story is looked for.

Remember the “big” story this time last year? It was another tragedy, the I35 bridge collapse. Coming out of that story the national media was up in arms about infrastructure and the poor state of our highways and bridges.

The I35 bridge reopened this week to little fanfare nationally. It reopened under budget and three months earlier than expected. This tremendous accomplishment has been pushed to the side while “bigger” stories are discussed.

For transit, though, this should be a continuation of the biggest story facing the industry — infrastructure. Simply, we need a massive investment in it. We can rebuild a major highway structure in less than a year, yet, it takes decades to make bus or rail improvements?

We need to make infrastructure improvements to make sure we can prevent tragedies like I35 and the Metrolink crash from happening again. Time is not on our side here. It needs to be done now, so a decade from now we’re not still looking around asking when things will be done.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 7:21 am and is filed under MT Position. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.