ICLE Issue Brief: Railway Safety Act Could Derail Freight-Rail Innovation Without Improving Safety
PORTLAND, Ore. (May 4, 2026) — The Railway Safety Act, reintroduced in the U.S. Senate earlier this year, would impose billions of dollars in compliance costs on an industry already operating at its safest point in history, while threatening the innovation that helped produce those gains, according to a new issue brief from the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE).
In the brief, ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout argues that the bill would mandate sweeping rulemakings without cost-benefit analysis, lock in current-generation technology, and impose high-profile requirements—most notably a two-person crew mandate—without a clear evidentiary basis. A performance-based framework would better promote both safety and economic growth, the brief finds.
“American freight railroads are safer today than at any point in their history,” Stout said. “Train accident rates are down by more than 38% since 2005, hazmat-release rates have fallen by at least 61%, and employee on-duty fatalities recently hit an all-time low. That progress was driven by private investment and innovation under the existing regulatory framework. The right policy response is to sustain that trajectory, not layer on prescriptive mandates that risk reversing it.”
Stout notes that Class I railroads moved quickly after the 2023 East Palestine derailment, adding roughly 1,000 wayside detectors, lowering bearing-temperature alert thresholds, expanding predictive analytics, and broadening first-responder access to real-time railcar data.
“The industry’s response outpaced any plausible federal rulemaking,” Stout said. “The act would largely codify what railroads are already doing, but at higher cost and with far less flexibility to adopt better technology as it emerges.”
The brief recommends setting measurable safety targets—such as derailments per million train-miles, hazmat-release rates, and bearing-failure rates—while allowing railroads flexibility to determine how best to meet them. It also calls for preserving voluntary industry initiatives and supporting smaller carriers through existing programs like the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements Program, rather than imposing unfunded mandates.
“Sound regulatory design requires more than urgency and good intentions,” Stout said. “The Railway Safety Act treats a dynamic engineering problem as a static checklist. A performance-based approach would align incentives, encourage technological progress, and direct safety capital toward its highest-return uses, rather than locking in the status quo at consumers’ expense.”
To arrange an interview with Stout, contact Jim Fellinger at [email protected]. Download the full report here.
About ICLE
The International Center for Law & Economics is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center working with a roster of more than one-hundred academic affiliates and research centers from around the globe. ICLE scholars promote the use of law and economics methodologies to inform public policy debates.