On Dec. 5, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) announced a statewide rail safety initiative intended to reduce the number of fatalities and injuries on state railways. The announcement came just days after the Associated Press published an analysis of Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) data revealing that Virgin Trains USA, the high-speed Florida rail line formerly known as Brightline, has the worst per-mile death rate of any of the nation’s 821 railroads. The announcement also came just weeks after 58-year old Valery Jo Rintamaki and her two grandsons, 10 and 8-year olds Tristan and Skyler Prestano, were killed by a train near West Palm Beach while driving to a Cub Scouts camping trip. The area had no drop-down gates, lights or signal, and their vehicle was dragged by the train for a half-mile after Rintamaki unknowingly drove into the path of the oncoming train. Democratic State Rep. Matt Willhite, who lives in the same town as the family, said after the inci...

December 19, 2019

On Dec. 2, the Associated Press published an analysis of Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) data revealing that Virgin Trains USA, the high-speed Florida rail line formerly known as Brightline, has the worst per-mile death rate of any of the United States’ 821 railroads. Since test runs of Brightline’s rail service began in 2017, 41 people have been killed in accidents involving its trains, which is “a rate of more than one a month and about one [fatality] for every 29,000 miles the trains have traveled.” In comparison, the Florida East Coast Railway, which shares tracks with Virgin Trains, had one death for every 160,000 miles; this means that based on the miles traveled, Virgin Trains causes around 5.5 deaths for every one death caused by East Coast. The Tri-Rail commuter line, which runs nearby, had one death per every 110,000 miles; in other words, based on miles traveled, Virgin Trains causes roughly 3.8 deaths for every one death caused by Tri-Rail....

December 10, 2019

In 2015, an Amtrak passenger train derailed in Philadelphia, tragically killing eight people and injuring hundreds of others; passengers and survivors were later awarded $265 million in a court settlement. In 2017, an Amtrak train in Washington state derailed during its first ever passenger trip on a new route, killing three and injuring 65 passengers; at the time of the crash, the train was going over 78 miles per hour on a dangerous curve that had a speed limit of 30. A jury later awarded three victims of the Washington derailment $17 million in damages over the preventable crash. And in 2018, an Amtrack train carrying Republican members of Congress slammed into a garbage truck in western Virginia, killing a truck passenger and injuring multiple others. If any of these crashes happened today, however, the passengers would not be allowed to sue. Amtrak’s Arbitration Agreement This year, Amtrak discreetly added a forced arbitration clause to its 15,500-word “Terms and ...

December 6, 2019

Between Amtrak’s one million annual Florida customers, the upcoming South Florida Virgin Trains USA rail line and Florida’s history of a sub-par rail safety record, it is clear that more efforts need to be made to keep the Sunshine State’s residents and tourists safe. Recently, such efforts were announced by Florida Senator Debbie Mayfield and Representative Tyler Sirious, who filed the Florida High-Speed Passenger Rail Safety Act in hopes of enhancing the safety of high-speed rail systems in the state. The legislation is composed of two bills that, if enacted, will go into effect on July 1, 2020:   House Bill 465 lays out the regulation of high-speed railroad companies, including requirements for railroad company reporting, minimum safety standards for high-speed rail systems, maintenance requirements of safety improvements, safety inspection requirements and the construction and maintenance of certain fencing.   Senate Bill 676, requires the D...

November 27, 2019

U.S. railroad accident statistics are staggering: in 2018, 841 people lost their lives in rail-related accidents. 261 of the 841 deaths, accounting for 31% of the total, were deemed to be suicides. On top of that, there were over 8,100 railroad incident-related injuries and illnesses recorded that same year. While there has been significant improvement in rail safety in recent decades, these numbers are indicative that further change is needed to improve public rail safety.   With safety in mind, the Federal Railroad Association (FRA) announced in February its first national strategy to address the alarming number of unintentional and intentional rail deaths, acknowledging that it needs to do more than simply educate the public. The four focus areas for the national strategy are data gathering and analysis, community engagement, funding, and partnerships with stakeholders.   In one example of data analysis, the FRA found that Broward and Palm Beach Counties in Florida ...

November 1, 2019

On Sep. 10, Florida State Senators Debbie Mayfield and Gayle Harrell announced new efforts to make Florida railroads safer, with a particular emphasis on railways along the East Coast corridor. The announcement comes as Virgin Trains USA continues construction on phase two of a rail service that will extend from South Florida to Orlando. The senators hope to see safety changes in place before Virgin’s construction is completed in 2022. Based on total track miles, Florida railroads rank as the most dangerous in the country, which is reflected in the high number of railroad deaths across the state. According to the Alliance for Safe Trains, 90 people have died on Florida railways in the 20 months since Jan. 1, 2018. Of those, 52 deaths involved Virginia Trains USA and Florida East Coast Railway trains, representing nearly 58% of the state’s fatalities. One safety recommendation introduced by Mayfield involves the installation of fencing and barriers at rail crossings to ...

October 2, 2019

Last month, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) issued a notice announcing the availability of more than $244 million in grant funding through the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) program. U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao described the purpose of the program, saying that “the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure & Safety Improvements grant program is an important resource for railroads to upgrade infrastructure and for communities to enhance safety on tracks and at railroad crossings.” One quarter of the funding will be dedicated toward rural transportation systems with the intention of enabling the FRA to improve the often-overlooked rural America’s rail infrastructure. Applications eligible for funding include those with projects addressing the following key objectives, and is available to both freight and passenger rail lines: Highway-rail grade crossings Upgrade short-line railroad infrastructure Relocate ...

September 27, 2019

Three years ago, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) sent their first plea to tech giants including Apple, Google, and Microsoft to add railroad crossings to their mapping services as an added safety measure. The NTSB believes that by doing so, some rail accidents that result in casualties could be prevented, especially due to people’s increasing reliance on navigation apps to get around. Unfortunately, this recommendation went largely ignored.   Now, the NTSB has released a report criticizing these tech giants for their failure to update their apps, insisting that more information available to drivers is always better. The report reads as follows: “the inaction by giant tech companies remains a frustration for safety advocates, at a time when hundreds of people die every year in collisions at U.S. railroad crossings, even as drivers increasingly rely on their smartphones’ GPS applications to tell them where to go.” The Federal Railroad Adm...

August 16, 2019

  On July 31, a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation revealed that multiple passenger and freight railroads are still struggling to fully implement positive train control (PTC) technology on their trains. Apparently, issues including software challenges and limited vendor resources have caused some railroads to fall behind in meeting the impending Dec. 31, 2020 final PTC deadline.   PTC is a safety technology that can prevent train accidents by automatically stopping trains. The PTC requirement was originally largely prompted by a tragic train collision in 2008 that killed 25 and injured 135 in Chatsworth, California. According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the Chatsworth incident could have been prevented by PTC technology. The NTSB also released a report saying that a 2017 train derailment that killed three passengers and injured 65 others would also have been preventable with PTC.   By the 2020...

August 7, 2019

In a recent filing, Virgin Trains USA announced plans to reveal the locations of up to three more South Florida train stations by the end of 2019. Currently, it has stations in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach. While the filing did not specify where the stops would be located, Virgin Trains officials met with Hollywood, Florida in early July and has plans to meet with Boca Raton officials later this month. This comes after Virgin Trains said in March that it was considering the Port of Miami and the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport as potential additional stops. Each of the stations would take 18 months to build and cost between $20 and $30 million apiece. It is unclear if those potential stations will be among those announced by the end of the year. It has also considered adding a stop in Aventura. In the meantime, the construction for Virgin’s controversial Orlando-South Florida rail line, a 170-mile new rail connecting West Palm Beach with the Or...

July 24, 2019