Let’s Not Compromise Safety

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

A spate of commercial aviation incidents in the U.S. has left a lot of travelers wary of going anywhere at all, whether by plane, train, or automobile. The good news for rail passengers is that whether you’re flying or driving, the odds remain very, very much in your favor...so long as we all insist that the Federal government not just pick up its ball and leave the safety playing field.

Just today, online news site Vox published a story asking, “Is It Safe To Fly Right Now?” In just the past 30 days alone, 79 air passengers have died in four separate, unrelated incidents. Since Christmas, 300 air passengers have died. Until late January, U.S. commercial air carriers had gone for 15 years without a fatal crash.

Fatalities among train passengers have also been vanishingly rare for the same period of time. During the past 15 years, 40 passengers have been killed in separate incidents on board trains, mostly commuter trains rather than Amtrak. One of those very rare exceptions, sadly, was the 2017 Amtrak 501 derailment in Washington State which killed our dear friends and members Jim Hamre and Zac Wilhoite.

Most safety analysts will tell you that the recent string of aviation incidents is a statistical fluke. Likewise, they’ll tell you that taking a train and leaving your car at home is a much safer option.

In sheer numbers, consider that in 2024 no American air-carrier passenger died, nor did any Amtrak or commuter-rail passengers. But close to 40,000 died on our nation’s highways, a rate that has been edging up steadily over the past fifteen years. In fact, going back to 2010 more than half a million Americans have died on the highways.

Once you normalize the data for the much-higher volumes of automobile trips versus flights or train rides, it’s clear that passenger rail remains 17 times safer than riding in a car. Passenger rail's passenger fatality rate per billion miles is 0.43; highways come to 7.3 fatalities per billion miles. Aviation is still much safer on a per-billion miles basis, but 300 fatalities since Christmas will skew these figures once the 2025 totals are added up.

Air traffic controller and pilot shortages are combining with increased air travel demand to degrade aviation-safety numbers. There’s also a bit of random clustering in there as well. Air traffic controllers are Federal employees, and their ranks have been thinned by recent Federal cutbacks.

When it comes to passenger-rail, there aren’t Federal employees out there doing the same job for trains that air-traffic controllers do for planes. Even so, there are hundreds dedicated Federal Railroad Administration staffers around the country working to make our passenger-rail network safer. They do everything from analyzing incident reports to developing and managing programs for workplace safety and conducting academic studies to understand better where wrecks happen, how they might be mitigated, and how to prevent more incidents from occurring. They also spend a lot of time inspecting systems and operations around the country, and working hand-in-hand with railroad operators, safety experts, and labor union representatives to make everything safer and more reliable.

I know this firsthand because one of the privileges of this job is a seat on the FRA’s Rail Safety Advisory Committee. A dedicated safety staff at the agency maintains nearly constant communication with many dozens of outside experts from freight railroads, commuter railroads, Amtrak, the shipping community, and many, many others. They manage a blinding array of outreach programs, and every one of them has safety as a top-of-mind concern. Just this week, I was in Cambridge for a meeting of our RSAC Working Group on Critical Incident Stress Plans, a clunky way of saying that railroads need to have robust programs in place to handle workplace trauma in an industry where most locomotive engineers can expect to be involved in six or more fatal incidents over the course of their careers.

This week a letter came out from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget demanding wholesale reorganization of every agency in the Federal government (see Sean Jeans-Gail’s story elsewhere in this issue). Allegedly there are carve-outs for safety-critical personnel, but we’ve seen other examples in this Administration of reality on the ground failing to match what’s on paper.

In my view, these safety folks at FRA and at DOT are truly essential. And if we want trains to remain as safe as they have been over the past 15 years for America’s rail passengers, then we need to make sure we demand that the Federal government forego cutting corners when it comes to keeping passengers safe.

Statistical fluke or not, the spike in aviation-related fatalities should be a sign to all of us that we need to demand the safety we all deserve, in every travel mode.