Replies

We have at least one train fall off the tracks EVERY SINGLE DAY. Of course we need PTC.

That arrangement was never going to happen. You can tell because here we are 30 years after the breakup and it still hasn’t happened. The biggest technological impediment is the same reason we don’t have competing electrical systems, water systems, gas systems, cable systems and everything else: who the hell is going to lay down the last mile to every single building in the country (or even just a city, or frankly a neighborhood) with only a 50/50 shot that any particular building will chose to be your customer. Then of course 20 years later new tech goes in place and you have to do it all over again.

The last mile is the nightmare of every utility. One the railroads studiously gets to avoid. It’s the most expensive part, and unless your guaranteed most the buildings in that last mile are customers there’s no way to turn a profit on it.

Please describe to me how a PTC system would prevent a derailment -- specifically for a freight train. As you think about that, keep in mind that damaged or misaligned track elements are the most common cause of train derailments.

The biggest technological impediment is the same reason we don’t have competing electrical systems, water systems, gas systems, cable systems and everything else ...

I would leave water and cable systems out of this discussion for a couple of reasons. For water, there's no effective way to introduce competitive systems because there really would be only one effective source of the water (reservoir, aquifer, desalination plant, etc.) for any given region. I would also suggest that there's very little capability for "improvements" in water delivery systems comparable to what you'd see in telecommunications.

Cable is no longer a good example because satellite TV and fiber-optic phone/internet service serve as competition for a cable company even if that cable company has an exclusive franchise on a region.

Let's look at gas and electric, though. Don't those systems operate exactly the same way the phone system works today -- long after the AT&T breakup?

The breakup of AT&T wasn't necessarily a good thing OR a bad thing. In retrospect, it was probably irrelevant because the entire telecommunications industry was going to end up facing revolutionary changes that would have left the old systems in the dust. There's no way you can sit here in 2016 and paint an accurate picture of how the telecommunications industry would be working under the old corporate structure when the only basis for your comparison is a company (AT&T prior to the 1980s) that operated before the internet, fiber-optic networks, and cellular technology even existed.