New York MTA balks at PTC cost
Written by jrood
It's the great train robbery -- and the feds are the stickup artists, according to the New York Post. Federal and congressional officials are demanding that the cash-strapped MTA drop $700 million on a safety program for Metro-North and LIRR that the agency insists it doesn't need, according to sources and memos.
The feds want a system
installed that allows a computer to reduce a train’s speed in a number of
situations. The MTA trains are already equipped with a similar system, but it
kicks in only when one is in danger of crashing into another.
The money would come from
the MTA’s 2010 capital program, the budget that funds mega-projects like the
Second Avenue Subway and currently has a $10 billion funding gap.
"It’s a lot of
money," said Bill Henderson of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee
to the MTA. "And my belief is that the MTA’s railroads are substantially
safer than many of the similar ones in the rest of the nation."
Metro-North hasn’t seen a
passenger die from a train crash in its 27-year history. The LIRR hasn’t had a
fatality since the 1950s. Still, Congress mandated in October 2008 that all
commuter railroads in the country install what’s known as positive train
control after 25 people died in a California crash.
But that California
railroad — like most others in the nation — was using far less sophisticated
equipment than the MTA’s, sources and documents say. Now LIRR and Metro-North
— the country’s first- and second-largest systems — have until the end of
2015 to install the safety measures.
In-house MTA lobbyists have
already asked the Federal Railroad Administration for an exemption.
The new system would have
"marginal benefit" and "introduced significant cost and risk to
a rail system which currently has a high degree of safety," MTA Deputy
Executive Director Chris Boylan wrote to the feds this month.
But Metro-North and LIRR’s
current systems "do not have the same capabilities of a fully integrated
positive train control system," said Warren Flatau, an FRA spokesman.
