The proposal is to REMOVE the liability, not to TRANSFER it to somebody else. If you remove the liability, there will be no lawsuits. If there are no lawsuits, there will be no fear of lawsuits. If there is no fear of lawsuits, there will be no reason to build in more quality than needed.
If that’s the case, why build in any reliability/quality at all?
Make the motorist responsible for his/her own actions and pull all the crossing protection except for, maybe, crossbucks.
[/sarcasm]
I understand what you’re saying. What I’m saying, is that the whole premise seems to be hinging on the idea of removing the liability. I’m saying, that’s not realistic, and therefore the whole idea is unrealistic… As schlimn points out, ANYTHING is possible. This proposal is possible. However, it is unrealistic, unlikely, and unbelievable.
If it’s possible to simply remove the liability, why not just go one step further, and declare that grade crossing accidents are no longer allowed? The latter is really not much less plausible than the former.
And after we do that, we will all join hands and sing kumbaya?
Let’s get back to reality. Too much money to be made in liability. It is not going anywhere.
Why is it not realistic? They do it in other countries. Every railroad and railfan is bitter over the injustice of blaming the railroad for hitting vehicles at crossings. Everybody knows trains can’t stop in time. So we give them the right of way. Then we sue them when they can’t stop in time.
Unrealistic, because step number one would be to have 535 lawyers reform the system that allows lawyers to play and win the big-money lawsuit lottery. After that, the rest comes easy.
I don’t know about unrealistic. I’ll grant you that it may be improbable. But I would hold out hope rather than to resign to it. It ought to be a pretty easy case to make. i.e. Trains have the right of way because they cannot stop fast. It works in Italy.
A pretty easy case to make? Call your congressman and run that by him. Let me know what he says.
Are you saying that this idea for new crossings has no merit because it is difficult? I thought you said your glass was half full a while back.
The concept has great merit, but it has a virtually insurmountable obstacle between concept and reality - and that is the tort system.
I’m sure that a great many crossings could be protected by low-cost systems, like radar. I can buy a handheld radar, new in the box, right now, for $800. Hook that up to a computer to sort out the necessary information (figure $2000) with appropriate enclosures, and you could have probably have grade crossing protection for something under $10,000 for a single track installation. You could probably even power it with solar panels.
But as long as you have to assign blame if the system fails, you have a problem.
And as has been said numerous times in other threads, the public assumes a certain level of protection. If this budget crossing protection has worked flawlessly for X period of time, then fails and someone is killed or injured, do we simply say “too bad, so sad, you should have looked both ways before crossing?”
Tort reform or no, somebody is going to take issue with that.
I don’t think they can list the probability of this ever happening - just take then numbers to the right of the decimal point in the mathematical term Pi - when they stop - and make it that much to 1 and then the lawyers would stop laughing. The legal system of the US has liability as it’s Cash Cow and Golden Goose rolled into one - they will NEVER kill the goose that lays the golden eggs or carve up the cow that delivers the cash.
since I am not a signal engineer I will defer to others who cn tell us how much redunant equipment is installed in an signal bungalow.
but an inexpensive signal system will be subject to destruction from – vandalism, accidents, weather ,weather , weather. what is all the weather? Hot weather, very cold weather, and the most destructive of all lightning. know of a location that took one lightning strike and took out 2 signal bungalos, & 5 separate close by crossing signals.
[quote user=“tree68”]
The concept has great merit, but it has a virtually insurmountable obstacle between concept and reality - and that is the tort system.
I’m sure that a great many crossings could be protected by low-cost systems, like radar. I can buy a handheld radar, new in the box, right now, for $800. Hook that up to a computer to sort out the necessary information (figure $2000) with appropriate enclosures, and you could have probably have grade crossing protection for something under $10,000 for a single track installation. You could probably even power it with solar panels.
But as long as you have to assign blame if the system fails, you have a problem.
And as has been said numerous times in other threads, the public assumes a certain level of protection. If this budget crossing protection has worked flawlessly for X period of time, then fails and someone is killed or injured, do we simply say “too bad, so sad, you should have looked both ways before crossing?”
Tort reform or no, somebody is going to take issue with that.
If we were going to get rid of liability - why have crossing protection at all? Just throw up a sign and call it a day. Not like you can sue if you are careless and get hit.
I guess under the new bucyrus system, when a signal gets damaged, you just leave a note- like you do on a vending machine that takes your money, and won’t give you the goods. When the accident clean up crew arrives, they’ll see your note, and pass it on to the non-liable maintenance company.
The general public believes correctly that we have crossing signals for public safety. If some here believe it is to prevent liability exposure, then perhaps that explains their defensiveness in regard to crossing accidents: Darwin awards, etc. And if some here assume automatically that a non-railroad signal system using advanced technologies is necessarily less safe and less likely to be repaired than one maintained by the railroad employees, then it is easy to see why there is such a knee-jerk reaction.
We have shown from this investigation that the risk inherent in these systems lies with the fact that while a good deal of reliability can be achieved from low-cost technologies — supported by a correlation between off-right-of-way reliability rankings and overall rankings — less can be said about enhanced safety. Consequently, a discrepancy exists between system reliability and the provision of vehicular safety that must be reconciled before low-cost systems are implemented.
But less safety is precisely what the report states.
Point blanks states that, and I quote the report, " less can be said about
enhanced safety. Consequently, a discrepancy exists between system reliability and the
provision of vehicular safety that must be reconciled before low-cost systems are implemented."
From the conclusion of the report…
"The installation of a low-cost system off-right-of-way presumes that the public sector will
bear the risk associated with grade crossing incidents caused by the underperformance of the
system. This leads to a second question: which public entity will be liable for system failures?
Obviously, some balance between system cost and assumed agency risk will have to be made
with the implementation of a low-cost system. Furthermore, system cost can be expected to be
more easily predicted than risk to the agency, and with fewer adverse consequences."
The report stated the public sector, then asks the questions which public entity will be liable…as opposed to the Italian laws which holds the indivdule responsible…therefore preposing some agency, (the report uses this word) would bear the liability.
So the only conclusion is the liability is being transfered to either this agency, or the individual, not simply done away with altogether.
Italy did not do
Assume? I deal with those issues every day. Nothing knee jerk about it, Mr. Schlimm.
Maybe I missed any discussion of PTC in this thread ? Since it’s coming to most railroad lines near you soon - like it or not - and will have the high reliability that everyone seeks (regardless of cost . . . [:-^]), PTC is a logical ‘platform’ on which to base a new grade crossing warning system.
PTC (GPS) was considered in the March 2005 research report that is the subject of this thread - see pages 32 - 36 inclusive (pages 46 - 50 inclusive of 136 in the ‘PDF’ version) at:
http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/archive/NotesDocs/3-76B%20Report.pdf
However, PTC was not investigated further, apparently for the reasons set forth in this excerpt from pages 35 - 36 (49 - 50 of 136):
“The determination was made that the requirement for all locomotives to be equipped with GPS receivers and/or with communications capabilities was not wholly compatible with our mandate to assess the availability of low-cost active warning systems. It is our opinion that the need for a captive fleet of locomotives limits — in the short term — the viability of this approach to address the large number of passive crossings existing on systems where locomotives are frequently interchanged. Further, the direct and active involvement of railroad companies also decreases the chance that this approach to traffic control will become a widespread option within the near future.”
Of course, this analysis and conculsion has been “overtaken by events” of collisions and derailments, and the consequent Congressional mandate for PTC implementation by the end of 2015 . . . [sigh]
- Paul North.