The Railway Safety Act Goes Off Track
TL;DR
Background: As detailed in a recent ICLE issue brief, American freight railroads are safer today than at any point in history. Yet, since the 2023 East Palestine derailment, Congress has repeatedly reintroduced the Railway Safety Act, which would impose prescriptive federal mandates on an already improving sector.
But… The act rests on a flawed premise. It would mandate sweeping new rules without requiring cost-benefit analysis, putting it at odds with established federal policy. Its rigid specifications would risk discouraging the innovation that has driven decades of safety gains, while its most visible provisions appear driven more by special interests less than evidence on safety.
Moreover… The status quo already delivers much of what the act promises. The Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA) collaborative advisory process, voluntary industry initiatives, and market-driven investment have produced measurable safety gains without a change in the law. A performance-based framework that sets measurable safety targets and lets railroads decide how to meet them would preserve those gains and encourage continued innovation. The Railway Safety Act would replace this adaptive system with a rigid statutory mandate likely to do more harm than good.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Regulating Yesterday’s Problem
The Railway Safety Act responds to a real tragedy, but targets a shrinking problem. Over the past two decades, train accident rates per million train-miles have fallen by more than 38%, hazardous-materials train accident rates are down at least 61%, and employee on-duty fatalities reached an all-time low in 2023. Bureau of Labor Statistics data likewise show that rail transportation compares favorably with air transportation, warehousing, and urban transit for workplace safety.
Much of this progress comes from voluntary, industry-led investment. Class I railroads deployed roughly 1,000 additional wayside detectors, lowered bearing-temperature alert thresholds, adopted predictive analytics, and expanded first-responder access to real-time railcar data, all within months of the East Palestine accident.
Codifying what industry has already done, but at higher cost and with less flexibility, would not improve safety. It would add compliance burdens to an already improving baseline, with marginal benefits unlikely to justify the costs.
Mandates Without Math
The act’s core defect is structural: It mandates sweeping federal rulemakings without requiring agencies to show that benefits justify costs. That approach departs from Office of Management and Budget Circular A-4 and the cost-benefit discipline reaffirmed by Executive Order 14192. Even if analysis showed that costs would exceed benefits, the statute would still require the agency to proceed.
The stakes are real. The detector-spacing provision alone could cost $1.1 to $2.2 billion. Positive Train Control—a comparable 2008 mandate—cost roughly $10 billion to $15 billion. To justify spending at that scale, the act would need to prevent tens of thousands of incidents, or thousands of severe derailments, over a decade. Given current trends, neither scenario is realistic.
Recent macroeconomic work reinforces the point. A 5% increase in federal regulatory restrictions on freight transportation raises unit shipping costs by 0.8% to 2.3% and reduces shipment volumes by 1.4% to 4.1%, with effects that compound over time. These are persistent constraints on innovation-driven growth, not one-time adjustment costs.
Yesterday’s Tech, Tomorrow’s Rules
The act includes prescriptive federal standards for detector spacing, thresholds, and data protocols; uniform inspection requirements; and rigid tank-car deadlines. A federal rule written today would codify 2026-era technology and, given the FRA’s multiyear rulemaking timelines, likely be obsolete before it takes effect.
But that technology is already changing. Distributed fiber-optic sensing, LiDAR-based infrastructure monitoring, acoustic bearing detectors, machine vision portals, and IoT-enabled remote condition systems are in deployment or pilot phases.
Positive Train Control offers the cautionary tale. Congress mandated PTC in 2008, locking in a technical specification before the system had matured. Implementation required repeated deadline extensions and foreclosed potentially superior alternatives. The act’s detector and tank-car provisions risk repeating that mistake.
Safety by Headcount
No provision better illustrates the act’s evidentiary gap than the two-person crew mandate. In 2019, the FRA concluded that it “cannot provide reliable or conclusive statistical data” on whether one-person crews are safer or less safe than multi-person crews. The agency’s 2024 reversal introduced no new statistical evidence and rested instead on qualitative judgments about redundancy.
A statutory mandate would override collective bargaining and strip railroads of the flexibility to match staffing to route conditions, traffic density, and available technology. Its primary effect would be to preserve employment levels—a legitimate goal in some contexts, but one better addressed through bargaining than through federal safety law.
Big Rules, Small Rails
The act’s compliance costs would not fall evenly. Fixed federal standards impose roughly the same per-mile burden on a high-density Class I mainline as on a rural short-line carrier moving far less traffic.
Minnesota’s legislatively mandated 2026 Wayside Detector System Study modeled three detector-spacing scenarios across nearly 1,000 miles of Class II and Class III track. In each case, recurring operating costs exceeded quantified safety benefits, producing a negative net impact over 10 years. A targeted approach would support short lines through existing funding programs, rather than impose unfunded mandates beyond their financial capacity.
Let Results Drive the Rails
The regulatory-design literature distinguishes among technology-based regulation, which specifies means; performance-based regulation, which specifies ends; and management-based regulation, which requires firms to design systems to meet defined goals. Performance- and management-based approaches generally outperform prescriptive mandates because they preserve flexibility and reward efficient solutions.
For freight rail, that means setting measurable targets and letting railroads decide how to meet them. A performance-based framework would align incentives with outcomes, encourage technological progress, and direct scarce resources toward the highest-return safety investments.
Freight rail safety is improving. The policy challenge is to sustain and accelerate that progress—not to react reflexively to high-profile incidents with mandates that risk doing the opposite: imposing large, certain costs in pursuit of uncertain and unquantified benefits.
For more on this topic, see the ICLE issue brief “The Wrong Track: How the Railway Safety Act Risks Derailing Innovation” by Kristian Stout and Subiksha Ramakrishnan.