Rail Transit: Reliability of FTA's Rail Accident Database

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As Congress requested, we conducted a review of challenges associated with enhancing safety on major rail transit systems. During the course of that review, we assessed the quality of data that the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) collects and maintains in its State Safety Oversight (SSO) Rail Accident Database. FTA, an agency within the Department of Transportation (DOT), collects these safety data, including data on types of accidents and causes, from SSO agencies and the rail transit agencies they oversee. FTA used the SSO Rail Accident Database to produce the agency's 2009 Rail Safety Statistics Report, which analyzed data from 2003 through 2008. Although we originally intended to report on safety trends using the SSO Rail Accident Database in the rail transit report, we determined that these data were not sufficiently reliable for such a purpose. As a result, in this review we further assess the SSO Rail Accident Database and FTA's processes for collecting and compiling the data. We determined that there are numerous inaccuracies in FTA's SSO Rail Accident Database and, consequently, the 2009 Rail Safety Statistics Report. FTA implemented changes to the data collection process over the past few years to address some of these issues. For example, FTA now requires SSO agencies to report incident specific information instead of aggregated or summary totals. In addition, FTA revised the definition of rail grade crossings to ensure consistent accident reporting by rail transit agencies, and now requests SSO agencies to provide unique incident tracking numbers to assist with data validation and prevention of duplicate entries. FTA is also working to validate and correct existing data in the SSO Rail Accident Database. Despite these changes, the SSO Rail Accident Database and the 2009 Rail Safety Statistics Report still include erroneous data. DOT is seeking legislative authority to directly regulate and enforce rail transit safety, in part on the basis of recent trends in accidents and injuries. There were several legislative proposals introduced during the 111th Congress to give FTA authority to establish safety regulations for rail transit agencies and, in cooperation with the states, oversee and enforce compliance by these rail transit agencies with these regulations. If FTA assumes greater oversight authority over rail transit agencies, accurate and reliable rail safety data will be critical. The purpose of this report is to convey our findings about how insufficient internal control over the entry and processing of rail transit safety data has negatively affected the reliability of the data contained in FTA's SSO Rail Accident Database and its 2009 Rail Safety Statistics Report.