When Amtrak 188 derailed in the Port Richmond section of Philadelphia on May 12, eight people died and more than 200 were injured. The official investigation into the accident is still ongoing, but the train’s 106 mile-per-hour speed—more than double the limit for the curved section of track it derailed on—is widely assumed to be the prime factor.   

For Vukan Vuchic, emeritus professor of transportation engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the potential causes of this tragedy also stretch decades into the past.

“Our country’s passenger railroads were the best in the world in the 1930s and ‘40s,” he says, “but then we went downhill. We froze the railroad system and federal money went into building bigger and bigger highways and air transportation systems. Maintaining rail passengers was not seen as a public good. Our federal government essentially said to the private railroad companies, ‘You’re on your own.’”

Being on its own meant Amtrak was supposed to generate operating costs from passenger fares in contrast to other forms of long-distance passenger transport, such as air travel and the highway system, which are massively subsidized by the federal government. 

Vuchic has written more than just a book on this balance—he has written three: a “transportation trilogy” of seminal textbooks that cover transit systems' technology, economics, social dynamics, public policy, and other factors that strongly influence not only transportation, but the quality of life in the cities they serve.  

According to Vuchic, the shift of federal support away from trains and toward cars and planes has stymied basic maintenance, much less innovation, in the nation’s railway infrastructure. So-called positive train control systems, which would automatically slow trains that exceed the varying speed limits for different sections of track, were required by law but never installed along the Northeast Corridor, the nation’s busiest railway line.  

He says "unfunded mandates” are likely to continue for the foreseeable future; one day after the accident, Congress passed a bill that would reduce grants to Amtrak by $250 million.

The tragedy is a stark reminder of one of the great motivators of Vuchic’s research on intermodal transportation: finding the right mix of technologies to make cities livable.

“A car is a great thing; you hop in and are free to go anywhere. But if all of us do that in a city, we get stuck and the system collapses,” Vuchic says. “I encourage my students to think about the niches that cars, buses, subways, and light rail systems fit into, and to think logically about how these family of modes interconnect. Our country needs major improvements in both urban and intercity, particularly modern, high-speed ground transportation.”