Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Empowering the Federal Transit Administration

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You may be surprised to learn that local transit systems are largely unregulated. When you fly, your aircraft is heavily regulated for safety by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Your car is built according to detailed safety regulations put in place by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Amtrak trains are similarly regulated for safety by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). These various agencies are charged with enacting rules that reduce the likelihood of accidents as much as possible, and for improving the chance of riders/drivers surviving accidents when they occur. As an example, NHTSA regulates lighting standards to ensure your car is sufficiently visible to other drivers, but it also requires the presence of seat belts, air bags, etc., to hopefully save your life in an accident (if you use them).

Local transit agencies like the D.C. area’s MetroRail, however, don’t have a true regulatory agency. There is a Federal Transit Administration (FTA), but it has been granted essentially no regulatory authority. They conduct safety audits and publish recommendations, but local transit systems are not compelled to follow those recommendations.

After an air crash, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigates, discovers the reasons for the crash, and develops recommendations that will reduce or eliminate the possibility of the same thing happening again. Most of the time, the FAA enacts the NTSB’s recommendations and makes them requirements for airlines and aircraft manufacturers to follow in the future. This process has, most likely, saved thousands of lives and has made our air transportation system mind-bogglingly safe for passengers.

Former NTSB head Jim Hall wrote in today’s Washington Post about the recent deadly MetroRail crash and what might have prevented it. Metro bears primary responsibility, since they wantonly disregarded the recommendations of the NTSB and FTA after previous incidents. However, we need to empower the FTA with regulatory authority akin to that enjoyed by the FAA and NHTSA. If the FTA had the authority to require compliance with NTSB recommendations following the 2004 Metro crash, Metro would have been forced to comply and the incident last month probably wouldn’t have been quite so severe. But it goes further than that. An empowered FTA could have taken the track circuit ‘flickering’ experienced by San Francisco’s BART system in the 1970s and used that knowledge to develop more stringent redundancy requirements for track circuit systems. A truly redundant, properly engineered system would likely have prevented last month’s incident entirely.

Metro’s Epic Fail

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I am absolutely disappointed in the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA, ‘Metro’). I’ve been disappointed in them before, and have criticized them before many times on this site, but their utter incompetence has now resulted in deaths. It’s long-past time for a complete re-do on the leadership of this transit system.

First, when I wrote about last week’s horrific MetroRail crash, I guessed that both the Automatic Train Control (ATC) system and it’s ‘fail-safe’ backup, Automatic Train Protection (ATP), used the same source of data to determine the location of other trains. My guess was, sadly, correct. The track circuit system that provides both ATC and ATP with information about the locations of nearby trains provides a single point of failure. Even those of us who aren’t transportation engineers can tell you that ATC and ATP should each rely on multiple, independent sources of data. A simultaneous failure of these two systems should be effectively impossible, but the system was under-engineered. There is no excuse for this.

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Thoughts on the Holy Eucharist

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Catholic Mass is broken roughly into two parts, the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The Liturgy of the Word should be familiar to most Christians—centered on readings from Holy Scripture and a sermon/message by the Priest (the homily). Some analogue of this is, for most Christian communities, the center of worship. In my experience, most Protestant Christians base their opinions of a particular church primarily on their opinions of the pastor’s sermons.

The Liturgy of the Eucharist, however, is the center of Catholic Mass. This is something pretty much unique to Catholicism and Orthodoxy—the two oldest denominations and the truest adherents to to the first 1,500 years of Christian teaching and tradition. Some Protestant churches and denominations still practice ‘communion’ ceremonies that hearken back to the Liturgy of the Eucharist symbolically, but only Catholicism and Orthodoxy recognize the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Note that in every Biblical account of the Last Supper, Jesus says ‘this is my body’ and ‘this is my blood’ in reference to the bread and wine—not ‘this bread and wine symbolically represents my body and blood.’

I could write volumes about the Eucharist (and others have, indeed, done so), though I could only scratch the surface—especially since I’m still new to the Church and am still learning the truths she teaches. Here I will simply address the logistics very briefly. Lay members of the congregation bring forth the gifts (bread and wine), the Priest prepares the altar and then consecrates the bread and wine by speaking the words that Jesus spoke:

Take this all of you, and eat it; this is my body, which will be given up for you. . . . Take this, all of you, and drink from it; this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all men so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me. – from ‘Ordo Missae Cum Populo’ (Order of Mass with a Congregation)

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Oh Deer

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oh-deerI’ve been a total post-slacker this weekend. I was in a conference for work pretty much all day Friday and Saturday, and Melissa’s parents and brother were visiting most of the weekend too. On top of all that I’ve been doing my monthly computer maintenance, getting some chores done, going to Mass, and going on a 20-mile ride on my mountain bike. Enough for one weekend?

On my bike ride, I finally finished the last little bit of Fairfax County’s Cross County Trail. I had done about 3/4 of it (in smaller chunks) last year, but didn’t finish before winter set in. This year it’s been so wet and rainy that I’ve gotten very little riding in on the mountain bike (though I have been doing regular rides on my hybrid on paved trails, which dry out quicker). Today was my first real mountain bike ride of any length this year.

For a county that is so well known as a suburban, over-developed, vibrant region, many are surprised to learn that Fairfax County has a ton on undeveloped parkland and rural areas, even close-in to DC. This undeveloped parkland even has wildlife in it, like the deer at right which I spied on my ride today.

Bear in mind that my phone’s camera doesn’t have zoom, so the deer is as close to me as it looks. It didn’t seem to be particularly bothered by my presence, and went about its business.

The Sad Case of Gov. Sanford (Updated)

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Governor Mark Sanford (R) of South Carolina has gotten himself into a big mess of his own making. It came to light this week that Sanford has been cheating on his wife with an Argentinian woman. If that wasn’t bad enough, he spent his Father’s Day weekend in Argentina with his mistress while his wife and children were at home (apparently) not knowing where he was, and his staff were left (apparently) thinking he was hiking the Appalachian trail.

I am generally uninterested in the sexual misdeeds of our politicians. Of course, character does count—if a man would lie to the woman he has pledged his life to, would he have any qualms about lying to his constituents? But this is something that the voters should consider at election time. I don’t think it’s productive to blow these scandals out of proportion and hype them up, since they’re basically irrelevant to a sitting official’s public duties.

There is an exception though. When a politician commits a crime or skirts his responsibility to his constituents, it is a relevant issue—even if it is tied to a personal indiscretion that would otherwise be publicly irrelevant. I didn’t particularly care that President Bill Clinton (D) was cavorting with interns, at least not from a political perspective (my moral perspective of the man is a different issue). I did, however, care when President Clinton committed perjury—a felony offense—in a vain effort to save face. I’d have gone to prison if I’d done it, so Clinton should have been removed from office.

Similarly, Sanford’s indiscretion is not, in-and-of itself, an actionable offense (though the voters should consider the man’s character in future elections). However, Sanford’s several-day-long disappearing act is an absolutely inexcusable dereliction of duty. His own family and staff apparently didn’t know where he was and, had there been an emergency, there might have been a dangerous power vacuum in the highest levels of the South Carolina government. If laws were broken, he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law (and impeached, if South Carolina law provides for impeachment). Even if laws were not broken, Sanford must resign—not because he cheated on his wife, which is a serious matter for him, his family, and his religious leaders to handle, but because he failed to act responsibly as governor.

Update 7/1/2009: I have done a bit of research (since I was looking at state constitutions for other reasons), and South Carolina’s constitution provides in Article XV a procedure for impeachment of governors and other officials “in cases of serious crimes or serious misconduct in office” (emphasis added). Impeach him!

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.