MTA Creates New Safety Positions

At Monday's LIRR Committee Meeting, the LIRR spent a lot of time talking about safety on the LIRR.  In an agonizing 34 minute and 47 second presentation to the LIRR committee that ate up practically all of the meeting, Ms. Williams introduced us to Lori Ebbighausen, the LIRR's Senior Director Corporate Safety & Training.  Ms. Ebbighausen then proceeded to give a presentation all about safety and safety training on the LIRR that was centered around this organizational chart:

The presentation highlighted may of the ways the LIRR emphasizes saftey within the organization.  I am not going to sit here and give a full play-by-play of everything, if you want to sit through the presentation yourself, you can view the archived video for yourself on the MTA's YouTube Channel.  The presentation starts at around the 16:30 mark and runs for about a half an hour.  Additionally, the slides Ms. Ebbighausen used in the presentation can be viewed online and you can get the gist of the presentation by just skimming those.

To give all the "Cliff Notes" version of the presentation, each of the MTA's agencies are basically creating a new position in their administration for a director of saftey, who will report directly to the agency presidents as well the MTA administration.  The way they made it sound, it seems like there will be either be monthly reports to each agency committee or they will take all of the saftey presentations and lump them into one new Safety Committee that will meet separate from all of the other meetings and focus exclusively on saftey there. (I am hoping they are going to go the second route, but I wasn't really paying attention and I don't see it on the meeting calendar for next month, so I'm not sure exactly what they said).

But perhaps one of the most important comments that came out of the whole presentation came at the end from Mr. Charles Moerdler.  His comment, I felt, brought this whole thing back to reality.  He basically asked if any of this stuff just presented was new.  And Ms. William's response was essentially no, none of this stuff is new, it's all things they have been doing all along.  The LIRR (and Metro-North, and the subways and buses, and all the other MTA agencies) have been operating safely all along.  The LIRR isn't sending trains barreling down the mainline with two wheels off the tracks, the LIRR is, and always was, extremely safe.

But, because of one unlucky accident, everyone automatically assumes that everything the railroad has done in the last 30 years has been unsafe, and that that, up until now, the MTA agencies haven't been given two hoots about saftey--which is simply untrue.  Naturally, there is always more you can do, and we will never be able to get to the point where there is a 0% chance of something going wrong.  There is some small element risk in every human (and even every computer-operated) system.  We can work to minimize that risk as much as possible, and that's what the agencies have been doing, and that's what they've been doing all along.

These new saftey positions have been created just because we now have to "show off" to all of the politicians and all of the cameras and all of the newspaper reporters how safe we are.  In all reality, all this new saftey talk and all these new presentations and the like are just wasting our time.  There were a lot of things they could have talked about at the LIRR Committee Meeting on Monday.  The 2013 OTP numbers were crummy, there were things in the financial parts of the book that could have warranted more discussion, the MDBF of every member of the diesel fleet dropped last year over 2012, there were a bunch of information items that I would have liked to hear more about instead of lumping them all into one "they're all in the book, any questions?" vote.

Now I'm not trying to deemphasize  the importance of saftey, I am instead calling into question the necessity of this whole charade.  We listened to a 34 minute presentation on Monday (in just one meeting) that essentially told us everything we already knew.  The railroads are very safe, and they have always been paying attention to saftey (despite some truly asinine remarks from self-proclaimed "commuter advocates" that claim otherwise).  I like being safe, and I think it's good to talk about saftey, but getting 40 minute lectures every meeting that drown out other things that warrant discussion won't help all that much in the long run.  Being safe is important, and hearing about saftey is important as well, don't get me wrong, but the MTA still has railroads, subways, and buses to run, and we can't forget about those.