Positive Train Control
Floor Speech
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Mr. President, the one thing the Senator from California and I share is a commitment, a longstanding commitment to getting a multiyear highway bill through here. I hope that is going to happen in the next few weeks.
We did need to move on a positive train control extension, and I am going to get into the reasons for that in just a minute. I think probably the most important fact is, as we look at this particular issue, that nearly every railroad in the country--including every major freight railroad--will not meet what is an unrealistic December 31, 2015, deadline for positive train control.
Positive train control--or PTC--when working as intended, is a critical safety technology that will prevent certain types of rail accidents and save lives. We have the ability to make rail transportation even safer by ensuring full implementation of positive train control.
As the chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, I can assure my colleagues that these disruptions would have caused cascading and devastating effects for nearly every sector of the economy and every region of the country. Railroads have already started notifying customers that they will stop accepting certain chemical shipments in late November and early December to ensure that such cargoes are off their system when the existing deadline hits at the end of the year.
As rail-dependent businesses and their customers prepare for the shutdown, they have already started to feel the negative supply chain effects on logistics and inventory management. The House-passed short-term highway extension provided an option to avert this completely avoidable and unnecessary harm.
This is not just about the railroads--contrary to what has been said on the floor that somehow this is a special benefit that only helps railroads. It is about the farmers--many of whom I represent in South Dakota--who depend upon the railroad for fertilizer. It is about the manufacturers and other businesses that depend upon rail for critical inputs, and it is about water treatment facilities that depend on rail for chemicals to purify drinking water. It is about all the workers and the households that benefit from this safe mode of transportation.
Rail-dependent commuters and customers cannot afford a congressionally caused railroad shutdown. That is exactly what would happen if we failed to act. Each day well over 1 million riders in the United States board commuter railroads to get to and from their places of work. Over 2 million people work in industries that use hazardous chemicals hauled by rail, and the gross economic output of these industries alone is over $2 trillion. In fact, the effects of a looming railroad shutdown would have occurred well in advance of the year-end deadline, which is where we are today. Over 130 farmers, manufacturers, and retailers wrote to Congress last week, stating that ``rail customers are already starting to feel the impact ..... [w]ith a shutdown just around the corner rail customers must start putting contingency plans into motion, including adjusting production schedules and workforce loads.''
This isn't just an economic issue. It has major implications for public health and safety. I mentioned earlier water treatment facilities across this country have urged a deadline extension and wrote a joint letter to me reiterating that point. I will quote from the letter, which is what they said: ``Even a temporary interruption of water disinfection chemical deliveries could risk a public health disaster for communities across this country.''
The U.S. Conference of Mayors also urged a deadline extension and wrote that switching from rail to other modes of transportation would lead to additional accidents in our Nation's communities and greater exposure to the risks of hazardous materials.
The Federal Railroad Administration's Acting Administrator, whom we just made permanent Railroad Administration Administrator, has the responsibility for conducting oversight of our Nation's rail network, and she expressed concern at a September commerce committee hearing. She said a rail shutdown would ``lead to significant congestion and it does lead to safety impacts.''
Keep in mind, total train accidents per year have decreased by nearly 50 percent since 2005. Rail is often the safest available way to haul many types of products, especially hazardous chemicals. It would take more than 600,000 trucks on our Nation's roads to replace freight rail, let alone the additional cars and buses needed to replace commuter rail.
When Congress passed legislation in 2008 mandating the implementation of positive train control, it never intended to punish rail customers or to harm the economy, but this law failed to properly consider the complexity and time involved in developing, mass producing, installing, and testing a new technology involving a complex network of new computers and communications equipment deployed on more than 20,000 locomotives and 60,000 miles of railroad track.
There is plenty of finger-pointing to go around as to why it didn't get done. The bottom line is this: After 7 years of work, over $6 billion of mostly private funds spent, and with about 2 months to go before the legal deadline, not one single railroad in this country--commuter or freight--has fully implemented positive train control.
For years, study after study, including those from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, found that the 2015 deadline for full implementation of PTC was unrealistic. The independent experts at the GAO concluded that the vast majority of railroads, including all freight railroads, would not meet the deadline by the end of the year.
I am pleased the Senate came together and acted on a solution. The bipartisan, bicameral proposal I helped craft does not just extend the deadline for implementing positive train control, it significantly increases accountability and transparency. Our proposal gives the Secretary of Transportation the authority to fine railroads if they fall behind metrics and milestones on their way to completing installation and full implementation. It requires detailed and publicly available reporting to ensure progress each step of the way.
Under our bipartisan proposal, railroads must implement positive train control by December 31, 2018. To ensure that PTC works as intended, the Secretary has very limited case-by-case discretion to allow railroads additional time for testing and certification but only if railroads complete all installation, spectrum acquisition, and employee training. To qualify for this additional time, freight railroads must have started using PTC on the majority of their territories or track. These accountability-focused changes, with objective criteria and rigorous oversight, are designed to ensure that we never need another extension.
I wish to extend my thanks to our colleagues on the House side--Representatives Schuster, DeFazio, Denham, and Capuano--for their strong bipartisan leadership and collaboration to address this major transportation issue. This issue has been extensively debated in the Senate. This proposal incorporates principles and text that have twice been reported out of the commerce committee and have passed the full Senate in July by a vote of 65 to 34. Let me repeat that. Everything we are talking about today--and it was modified a little bit when we negotiated this with the House--but the basic text, basic framework, basic outline of what we just passed had already passed the Senate as part of the Transportation bill with 65 votes earlier this year. The idea that this is somehow something that is being sprung on Members in the Senate is not consistent with the facts.
I am grateful to Senator Blunt and Senator McCaskill for their partnership and leadership to bring Congress together to ensure that PTC is made safely available as soon as possible. Some have suggested different ways to approaching this issue. At a time when we are making progress to finally end the kick-the-can mentality through the enactment of a multiyear transportation reauthorization bill, this proposal will ensure that we are not injecting that same type of uncertainty into another transportation mode, which is our Nation's rail system.
Attaching the bipartisan agreement on extending the PTC deadline as part of the short-term highway extension solves this problem while keeping pressure on the House of Representatives to pass a multiyear transportation bill that we can then reconcile with the Senate-passed DRIVE Act, the multiyear transportation bill that passed in this Chamber earlier this year.
I wish to applaud Leader McConnell, Chairman Inhofe, Ranking Member Boxer, and Ranking Member Nelson for their continued efforts to push for the completion of a multiyear transportation reauthorization bill. Due to constant pressure from the Senate, as was noticed with last week's markup by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, we can actually see the path to getting a bill done with our House colleagues.
The fact that the short-term extension before the Senate sets a November 20 deadline, along with the House planning to take up a multiyear transportation bill next week, indicates that it is, in fact, possible to soon get a multiyear transportation bill across the finish line.
Nobody should misinterpret my work and my efforts with my colleagues here in the Senate in addressing the harms associated with failing to fix the looming positive train control deadline. As a major part of the overall DRIVE Act, the transportation bill that passed Senate, the legislative text originated from the Senate commerce committee, and I will not be backing down in my efforts to see a host of transportation, safety freight, and rail provisions signed into law in the coming weeks.
Together we have averted the potential harm that would come with a congressionally caused rail shutdown. We have set a realistic positive train control deadline. We have held the railroads accountable and ensured the job is done swiftly and safely. It was important that be done in a swift and safe way.
Earlier my colleague from California quoted a story from the Washington Post that ran earlier this week. The Washington Post editorial board, the very same paper that my colleague from California cited, opined: ``Congress should revise the 2008 legislation to give railroads more time to come into compliance, with consequences for those who fail to produce concrete plans for immediate improvement and meet milestones along the way.''
But the very newspaper that the Senator from California was quoting actually editorialized on their editorial page that Congress needed to fix and to put in place an extension that would allow the railroads to come into compliance. That was echoed by a lot of the large newspapers across the country.
The Chicago Tribune's editorial board wrote:
PTC is coming. It's just not coming fast enough to meet what was always an unrealistic deadline. So if your commute is a mess come January, don't blame Metra. Blame Congress.
The Chicago Sun-Times editorial board opined: ``Congress should extend the deadline to give Metra and railroads a chance to get the job done.''
The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote: ``Rather than risk a shutdown of crucial transportation services, Congress ought to fast-track a solution.''
The problem we had here is that we didn't have the luxury of time, and so the vehicle that came over from the House of Representatives, which is a short-term extension of the highway bill, presented a chance for us to address this issue knowing full well that it had to be addressed and that it had to be addressed in a timely way. We have railroads and shippers in this country, that, as I mentioned earlier, have already indicated they are modifying and adjusting their operations and plans right now and notifying customers of the impacts and effects of Congress failing to act in a timely way.
The reason that this needed to be fixed now is that if we hadn't fixed it, we would have started to see the disruptions in our economy that would have come with a shutdown because, as I said, no railroad, to date, has been able to meet the positive train control deadline. We approached this in a way that we felt was reasonable, rational, logical, and kept the pressure on the railroads and required the accountability that is necessary to see this done in a realistic way. I think the end result that just passed the Senate is a good outcome and a good solution, not just for the railroads in this country but for the shippers, farmers, and States such as South Dakota that depend upon those railroads, for the commuters around this country who rely on that form of transportation every day to get to work, and for the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who work in those railroad-related industries across this country. This is one example where Congress demonstrated that it actually could, in a timely way, act responsibly to bring about a solution that will avoid what surely would have been not only an economic disaster but a public safety disaster as well.
I am pleased that our colleagues here in the Senate found a way to approve this today, and I hope, as I said before, that we will continue to keep the heat on to get a multiyear transportation bill through the House and the Senate with this short-term extension through November 20. It gives us a few weeks to complete action on that piece of legislation. But we didn't have the luxury of time nor could we afford to wait to act and to make sure that this positive train control extension was put in place in a timely way.
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