The National Transportation Safety Board issued an urgent safety recommendation to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority as part of its investigation into last month’s MetroRail crash. Identifying concerns about WMATA’s train-control system, NTSB issued this recommendation:
Take action to enhance the safety redundancy of your train control system by evaluating track occupancy data on a real-time basis in order to detect losses in track occupancy and automatically generate alerts. Alerts should prompt actions that include immediately stopping train movements or implementing appropriate speed restrictions to prevent collisions.
NTSB also urged the Federal Transit Administration to notify other transit agencies with similar systems to take appropriate safety actions. The Washington Post quotes a statement from Metro saying that the agency is already contacting vendors: “We will be developing a new system that will be specifically tailored to Metro.” Link to full story and NTSB letter in The Washington Post.
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