Norton Applauds Administrations Transit Safety Proposal But Says Metro Shows Difficulties (12/9/09)
Norton Applauds Administrations Transit Safety Proposal
But Says Metro Shows Difficulties
December 9, 2009
WASHINGTON, DC - The chair of the Highways and Transit Subcommittee asked Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D - DC) to take the chair for a portion of the hearing yesterday on the administration's proposed national safety standards for transit operators. Norton, who is co-sponsor of a bill for national safety standards and sponsor of a bill even more related to the June Metro crash, said she is relieved that the administration has moved quickly to develop a proposal that include the core provisions in the bills that regional members introduced after the June 22nd Red Line tragedy.
However, Norton questioned Federal Transit Administration Administrator Peter Rogoff closely about the administration's proposal permitting states to opt-out of direct federal inspections and regulations, and instead to take federal government funds for their own operations, regulations staffing of the state agencies. Federal regulators would approve state safety regimes and would step in if state safety regulation were inadequate, according to Rogoff. However, Rogoff was not able to explain to Norton why federal funding of separate state agencies throughout the U.S., complete with overhead and administrative costs, was not more costly and inefficient than current transportation safety regulation, such as for aviation and railroads.
Testimony from the General Accounting Office (GAO) revealed that most existing state regulators today mirror the Tri-state Oversight Committee for Metro in this region, which has no staff, equipment, or enforcement authority. Norton said she believes that the administration proposal will prove to be significantly more costly in funding state safety regulators, she said the proposal is probably intended to avoid opposition to the creation of a new federal agency.
In light of the Metro crash here, in June, during which nine people were killed, seven from the District, Norton pressed Administrator Rogoff to include a timeline for implementation. She warned that each state would have to draw new laws and regulations. Rogoff said that only three years would be allowed to the states for start up.
Norton also told Rogoff that national safety standards implicated in her bill, H.R. 3975, introduced after the Metro crash to require the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to consider interim measures pending implementation of costly state of the art recommendations that most states could not fund immediately. She cited the 10 years after several collisions that the NTSB continued to press Metro to replace 1970s-era cars, in which all the passengers who died in June were riding, even though NTSB knew that Metro did not have the large sums required for replacement. Only this year and only after the Metro tragedy, has the first $150 million been appropriated. Norton also reminded the panel that most states will not have access to federal funds for new purchases, as Metro has finally received because our system's major weekday riders are mostly federal employees. When Local 689 of the Amalgamated Transit Union suggested, after the Metro collision, positioning the older cars between newer ones, Metro did so, but NTSB itself never made this suggestion. In light of the NTSB insistence on impossible remedies and other funding realities, Norton will seek to incorporate her bill into the final bill.
The Congresswoman, who had met with the American Public Transportation Association, one of the witnesses at the hearing, said that its state of the art standards, drawn with the assistance of federal funding, already provide guidance from which the state and federal government could easily draw realistic standards.