Case Study of Good and Evil on the Rails

2563 Words11 Pages
A CASE STUDY ANALYSIS: GOOD AND EVIL ON THE RAILS | | 10/14/2013 10/14/2013 1.0 Introduction The ethical dilemma presented in the case study is in regard to the government intervening and trying to regulate business specifically in the sphere of transportation safety in the railroad industry. The case describes an egregious example of a railroad engineer’s disregard for safety regulations resulting in an accident in which 24 passengers died and over 100 more were injured in southern California. Against regulations, the engineer was texting and phoning from the cab while operating the train, but managerial oversight of the in-cab activity of engineers was almost impossible due to the lack of cameras in train cabs. In the aftermath of the accident, the U.S. Congress passed a comprehensive law aimed at preventing such incidents in the future—a law resulting in billions of dollars of cost to railroad companies but having low government-identified cost/benefit ratios. The most expensive part of the law required positive train controls (allowing remote operators to take control of a train if necessary) be installed on most trains at a cost “between $9.6 billion and $13.3 billion over 20 years.” The benefit-cost calculations performed by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) were just “$440 million to $674 million over 20 years” (Steiner, 2012, p. 350). This is a ratio of more than 20:1 (cost over benefit) for just one of the new regulations imposed; the FRA estimated that the new regulations would also require railroads to spend an additional 1.7 million hours per year on new paperwork requirements (Steiner, 2012, p. 350). 2.0 Case Study Analysis Question 1: What were the causes of the Metrolink accident? Causes of the Metrolink accident can easily be broken into the naturally disjoint categories of proximate and distal causes. The

More about Case Study of Good and Evil on the Rails

Open Document