Dallas, TX — Chris Wallace, president and CEO of the North Texas Commission, argues in a Nov. 10 op-ed for The Dallas Morning News that the House surface transportation bill would lock freight rail into yesterday’s technology, and that the Senate can still change course.
The concern is a provision that would write a two-person crew minimum into federal law permanently. Wallace points out that Positive Train Control, already deployed across major freight corridors, was built to prevent the human error such rules aim to guard against.
“Locking staffing levels into statute doesn’t make trains safer; it just guarantees that federal law can’t keep pace with the technology railroads are already using to make rail safer.”
The stakes are high in Texas, where trains move more than 350 million tons of freight every year and 55 freight railroads connect manufacturers, farmers, energy producers and ports to markets across North America. Wallace warns that higher compliance costs “ripple across the supply chain, affecting manufacturers, energy producers, retailers and ultimately consumers.”
He calls on Sen. Ted Cruz, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, to apply the technology-neutral approach he has backed for emerging transportation technologies to freight rail.
“North Texas has never viewed innovation and safety as competing priorities. We’ve demonstrated that smart policy can achieve both.”
