Wrangle Obama away from the Bulls game he may sign it pronto.

It seems Obama is a positive rail guy.

Kind of a rare time the factions of government this time around put their heads on and get this one done.

"Almost as an aside, now that she is no longer caught in the middle, the Senate confirmed Sarah Feinberg as the FRA Administrator. "

Oh, yeah. I am reminded of a speech given by one of the more prominent preservationists upon receiving an honor from his Alma Mater in 1998.

"Prior to joining USDOT, Feinberg served as the Director of Corporate and Strategic communications at Facebook where she managed the company’s Washington-based outreach and communications as well as the company’s political and crisis communications. She was also previously Bloomberg LP’s Director of Communications and Business Strategy.

From 2009-2010 she served in the Obama Administration as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. As the Chief of Staff’s liaison to the Obama economic team, the national security team, and the press and communications departments, she most notably worked on the White House’s strategic communications response to the country's fiscal and economic crisis, the H1N1 flu pandemic and the mine disaster in West Virginia.

Feinberg is a graduate of Washington and Lee University with a DEGREE IN POLITICS. Prior to serving in the White House, Feinberg spent several years on Capitol Hill, serving as communications director for the House Democratic Caucus, and the national press secretary to former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle."

Don't see much background in railroads there.


(In my profession we often consider that to be cleaning up the mess left by the other two branches)

So who cleans up the messes left by the judiciary? It took forty years to fix Korematsu, which sheepishly affirmed Executive Order 9066. The Kelo's home was razed to make way for an empty field. Somehow, I read something like that and I'm reminded of Shakespeare and Henry VI....

The bill was signed by the President earlier this afternoon.

GME

It seems to me that the mandate and the new deadline now exist in name only with no way to actually enforce them.

"It seems to me that the mandate and the new deadline now exist in name only with no way to actually enforce them."

The problem is the system only exists in part and remains a conceptual ideal, with potential "Black Swan" uncertainties.

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

F A Hayek

A mandate needs a deadline in order to be a mandate. Now, there is no longer any deadline that can be enforced in practicality. So PTC mandate is moot. Now, there is all the time in the world to move forward with the consideration safety improvements. The only driver will be fate and the train wrecks it produces as motivators.

PTC will always be a work in progress chasing the rapidly evolving technology. The flash of a decisive mandate will be replaced by the steady drip of incremental safety regulations, each resisted, but unstoppable as a whole. In the end, this was a failure of Congress to write a check that they couldn’t cash.

They have another rubber check out there in the form of the ECP brake mandate for oil trains. The hostile reception of that mandate by the industry is a sure sign that it too will fail to meet the deadline and become moot along with the PTC deadline.

How can you mandate what does not exist?

Just because somebody dreams up an idea, doesn't mean it can be done, and things that are really appealing in concept don't always work as intended, even if it really strikes the fancy of politicians.

The mandate called for creating what does not yet exist. Congress saw no problem with that. PTC itself did not exist. It had to be created. I doubt that Congress saw the distinction.

I agree that there is added uncertainty in mandating a technology that does not yet exist because it is hard to predict what it will require to create it. But there is lots of other uncertainty in the mandate such as just getting the work done in time with what does exist. A Federal mandate for deep pockets to spend money produces a feeding frenzy for suppliers and product developers. They will want to milk that for all it's worth.

To me, the most astounding part of what Congress did not see was that the mandate was meaningless from the start because the consequences of enforcing it would be unacceptable to the nation due to the economic damage from a railroad shutdown.

Somebody needs to explain how that point was overlooked in 2008.

"If you build it, (or mandate it) they will come" is a movie line, not a strategy.