Report: FRA should promote technology and safety innovation

WASHINGTON— The Federal Railroad Administration should promote track and equipment inspection technology innovation by overhauling its safety waiver review process, according to a think tank that focuses on infrastructure issues.

The Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure says the FRA’s safety waiver process has been bogged down by outdated rules and political interference. The group examined the waiver review process in a report released today.

“We need a regulatory system that matches the speed of innovation,” said Benjamin Dierker, executive director of the Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure and lead author of the report. “The FRA’s current waiver process too often delays or denies safety-enhancing technologies without clear justification. Reform is not just overdue – it’s essential.”

As Trains News Wire has reported, the FRA during the Biden administration stymied Class I railroad efforts to combine automated track and equipment inspections with traditional visual inspections in ways that weed out the highest number of defects that can cause derailments. In many cases, the FRA ignored its own regulatory deadlines and failed to act on safety waiver requests.

Railroads are permitted unlimited use of automated track inspection systems that rely on lasers, machine vision, and other technology to find track geometry defects. But without a waiver from the FRA, railroads cannot simultaneously scale back the required frequency of visual inspections of main lines where the automated systems are deployed.

Many of the regulations guiding railroad operations today were drafted more than half a century ago and fail to incorporate modern inspection technologies. According to the report, the waiver process that allows railroads to bypass outdated rules has become increasingly politicized, opaque, and inconsistent — a formula for undermining safety, innovation, and long-term investment.

The report makes five recommendations.

• Increase the transparency of the Railroad Safety Board’s decision-making process.
• Limit political influence by allowing career safety professionals to lead waiver evaluations.
• Recognize proven technology by granting long-term waivers for successful safety innovations.
• Prevent bureaucratic delays through automatic provisional approvals when the FRA misses its own statutory deadlines.
• Trigger regulatory review when multiple waivers are granted for the same FRA rule.

Adopting the recommendations would move the FRA toward a data-driven approach and a regulatory model based on performance.

AII’s report includes a case study on automated track inspection systems, which have been shown to significantly improve defect detection and inspection efficiency. Over the past four years the FRA denied or delayed multiple automated track inspection waivers, forcing railroads into protracted legal battles culminating in a ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals holding the FRA’s waiver denials to be “arbitrary and capricious.”

“We cannot allow political cycles to dictate safety decisions,” Dierker said. “Our rail network — and the communities it serves — deserve consistent, transparent, and data-based policies.”

An FRA spokesman did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment this morning.