1. Ian Savage (1998). The Economics of Railroad Safety. (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers - now known as Springer)
[Publisher Information - North America]  [Manuscript Version]

The public perception of the safety of railroads centers on images of twisted metal and burning tank cars, and a general feeling that these events occur quite often. After a series of railroad accidents, such as occurred in the winter of 1996 or the summer of 1997, there are inevitable calls that government "should do something."

However, the reality of railroad safety is much different from the perception. The major safety issues are not collision or derailments, but rather occupational injuries to employees, collisions with negligent road users at highway grade crossings, and the general proclivity of people to trespass on the railroad. Contrary to popular perception, accident rates have fallen throughout the twentieth century. Employee injury rates are a third of those of a generation ago, and grade crossing fatalities per automobile owned have fallen by half over the same period. It is ten times safer to travel by train than to drive.

Yet the railroads are subject to considerable safety regulation. It may come as somewhat of a shock to realize that much of this regulation is quite recent. Back in those halcyon days when passenger trains were the primary means of long-distance travel, the industry had little formal governmental regulation but substantial self regulation. Then in 1970 the Federal Railroad Safety Act gave government rulemaking authority over "all areas of railroad safety." Nowadays the Code of Federal Regulations reads like an engineering textbook on how to build, maintain and operate a railroad.

A generation ago, transportation economists were at the forefront of questioning whether economic regulation of prices and quantity of service by government was in the public interest. This research explores whether similar questions can be raised about regulation of the quality of service: What is the justification for the current safety regulations of the railroads? Why did it happen? Are the current regulations in the public interest? Are there better alternatives?

For readers outside North America, go to www.springeronline.com for local ordering information. The ISBN number is 0-7923-8219-6.

2. Ian Savage (1999). Railroad safety and public policy. Journal of the Transportation Research Forum 38(1):56-63.
[Manuscript Version]

This paper provides some brief introductory material on railroad accidents and recent trends, but primarily deals with public policy analysis and prescription. It summarizes the main public policy conclusions of my 1998 book.

3. Ian Savage (2003). Deregulation and Safety: Experiences from the United States. Deregulation and Transport Safety in Rail - What is the Best Practice in the European Union? Workshop - Brussels, Belgium, October 2003.
[Manuscript Version]

This paper initially describes the theoretical intuition as to the possible linkages between economic regulatory reform and transportation safety. It then empirically assesses the strength of these possible linkages based on the experience of the United States. The United States provides a useful case study in that economic liberalization occurred more than a generation ago in the late 1970s. Consequently, one can take a more long term view given the passage of time. The primary focus is on the railroad industry, but the paper also discusses the experiences in trucking and commercial aviation.

4. Shannon Mok and Ian Savage (2005). Why has safety improved at rail-highway grade crossings? Risk Analysis 25(4):867-881.
[Journal Website]  [Manuscript Version]  [Houston Chronicle op-ed summary]

The number of collisions and fatalities at rail-highway intersections has declined significantly over the past thirty years, despite considerable increases in the volume of both rail and highway traffic. This paper disaggregates the improvement into its constituent causes. Negative binomial regressions are conducted on a pooled data set for 49 states from 1975 to 2001. The analysis concludes that about two-fifths of the decrease is due to factors such as reduced drunk driving and improved emergency medical response that have improved safety on all parts of the highway network. The installation of gates and/or flashing lights accounts for about a fifth of the reduction. The development of the Operation Lifesaver campaign, that seeks to inform the public on appropriate conduct at crossings, in the 1970s and early 1980s; and the installation of "ditch lights" on locomotives in the mid 1990s, each led to about a seventh of the reduction. Finally, about a tenth is due to closure of crossings resulting from line abandonments or consolidation of little-used crossings.

5. Ian Savage (2006). Does Public Education Improve Rail-Highway Crossing Safety? Accident Analysis and Prevention 38(2):310-316.
[Journal Website]  [Manuscript Version]

Improvements in rail-highway grade crossing safety have resulted from engineering, law enforcement, and educating the public about the risks and the actions they should take. The primary form of the latter is a campaign called Operation Lifesaver which started in the 1970s. This paper uses a negative binomial regression to estimate whether variations in Operation Lifesaver activity across states and from year-to-year in individual states are related to the number of collisions and fatalities at crossings. Annual data on the experience in 46 states from 1996 to 2002 are used. The analysis finds that increasing the amount of educational activity will reduce the number of collisions with a point elasticity of -0.11, but the effect on the number of deaths cannot be concluded with statistical certainty.

A paper summarizing the findings of this paper and the Mok and Savage paper was presented at the 9th International Level Crossing Safety and Trespass Prevention Symposium, Montréal, Québec in September 2006 [11 pages, 124 kb PDF].

Safety at grade crossings was discussed in a podcast on the Infrastructure Show Motor Vehicles and Trains - a Deadly Mix on October 1, 2022.