WASHINGTON — The National Transportation Safety Board is retiring its “Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements,” a method the agency has used since 1990 to call attention to safety issues.
“The Most Wanted List has served the NTSB well as an advocacy tool, especially in the days before social media, but our advocacy efforts must advance,’’ NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in a statement last week. “Freed from the structure of a formal list, the NTSB can more nimbly advocate for our recommendations and emerging safety issues.”
The agency points to positive train control as one of the inprovements that has come since the creation of the list, along with better crashworthiness protection across all modes of transportation, tank car safety, and improvements in hazardous material shipments.
The most recent Most Wanted List, issued for 2021-22, included one rail-specific topic — rail worker safety — among its 10 items [see “Digest: NTSB includes rail worker safety …,” Trains News Wire, April 7, 2021]. An NTSB archive of Most Wanted List activity is available here.
Here an idea: Why doesn’t congress just give the NTSB regulatory/event summary fine ability and let them fine industry based on the merits and damage rather than the FAA, AAR/FRA, or these other industry beholden “safety” entities who give “slap on the hand” fines in the 10’s of thousands of dollars when fines in the millions of dollar would make the message much clearer and punitive to actually solve the problems rather than just letting them be a very small “thorn in the paw” which will be easily dismissed by the finee and life will go on, with minimal change… which just leads to more problems they will have to investigate and so the cycle continues.