Nice little railroad you have there. Be a shame if something were to happen to it.
“Fewer”.
Exactly. Aotomation and AI are great if humans are in the loop sanity checking it and overseeing it - increases human productivity while maintaining human accountability. So they can’t say, ‘Oh, the Ai made a mistake’, aka ‘’It was a computer glitch’, as was used previously.
Reminiscent of the Luddites. Labor has been opposing automation since the start of the Industrial Revolution so it’s a given that any proposed automation will be reflexively opposed.
Whether this makes rail transport safer or riskier remains to be determined. However, I don’t have great faith in unionized track inspectors.
Folks,
neither one is perfect. In fact, one might be better than the other. Our minds go to it is all one and none of the other. might be more tech and less govt.
Technology is never a substitute for good management but it can be a useful tool to good management.
the key is good management.
Our rail system already has automation inspecting rail cars "on the fly" -- and those systems catch problems before they cause catastrophes. For rail, electronic sensors can only do so much; you need eyeballs to catch all the problems. Can sensors detect rail spikes that are no longer holding the rail to the ties? Can sensors detect "leaning" rails?
Can electronic track inspection be made cheap enough to be installed in every power unit?
Fewer
Gee, I don’t know? Let’s ask the experts in East Palestine, Ohio.
Business seems to be in ready-fire-aim mode with AI.
If railways implemented automated solutions in parallel with current safety measures and stress tested them they could ensure safety/reliability. The worker per production unit ratio could then be reduced through expansion/attrition/layoff.
What execs want to do is cut out the people now, take their profits, and count on the processes to be improved before the ensuing chaos breaks the company. Given their golden parachutes I’m sure it’s a risk they are willing to take.
US Railroad regulation is a hairball of government rules, control and micro-management, which has been built layer-by-layer by progressives and Fed.gov bureaucrats for 140 years.
Due to this long and highly political history of railroads, this industry is regulated like NO OTHER industry in the USA.
As such, I posit that no one here can have a concept of what is “common sense” regulation, what is necessary and what is unnecessary to run a railroad in the 21st century - myself included.