Thank you, Chair.
Transport Action Canada is a national volunteer-based organization and a registered charity. We were created back in 1976 in response to an invitation from the government for public participation in planning the future of transcontinental rail travel. At that time we were known as Transport 2000. We later extended our area of interest to all public transportation modes—intercity bus, ferries, urban transit. We have had a long-standing interest in transportation safety and are frequently called on by the media for comment on safety matters.
We have affiliate organizations across Canada. One of our affiliates, le Groupe TRAQ, organizes the annual colloquium on railway safety in Quebec City, which I attended last week, along with many industry and government experts. We also have a strong involvement with airline passenger safety. This dates back to the Swissair flight 111 crash in 1998 when, with other groups, we founded an air passenger safety group that continues to consult with Transport Canada on an ongoing basis on air safety matters.
We do believe that statistically air and rail, which are generally federally regulated transportation modes, are very safe. However, accidents, particularly those with multiple fatalities, dangerous goods spills, or major fires do attract considerable media attention and raise public concern. We note that highway rail collisions or pedestrian accidents at rail crossings or on railway lines are actually a very small number when compared to the accident statistics for the highway mode. Nevertheless, we believe that rail crossing safety should be a continuing major concern of the federal government and particularly here in Ottawa where, in September of last year, there were six passenger fatalities on a double-decker transitway bus, an accident that should have been avoidable. Hopefully, we'll find out precisely why that accident happened before too long.
We are strongly supportive of the expertise and independence of the Transportation Safety Board and particularly of its openness about ongoing investigations. We understand the importance of not trying to second-guess the reasons for an accident before the TSB's investigations are complete. We note the items that have already been discussed today on the TSB watch list, and one which we feel particularly strongly about is the need for positive train control. Ms. Tadros mentioned to you the progress that's being made because of legislative action in the United States. Certainly in many other parts of the world, positive train control is the standard rather than something to think about sometime in the future. The TSB has been recommending it strongly, particularly since the VIA Rail accident at Saint-Charles-de-Bellechasse, Quebec, in February 2010, and the Burlington accident in 2012.
I will say as an aside on positive train control that I personally was involved in Ottawa with the planning of our O-Train here, which is the only federally regulated railway that does operate with positive train control. The O-Train has one-man operation. There is a German-based system that ensures the train cannot exceed allowable speeds at stations or cannot pass signals that are at stop. That technology has permitted that system to achieve a complete absence of fatalities or injuries among passengers over its more than 12 years of operation. Today it carries more than 14,000 passengers a day. It would be good if that kind of technology had been extended to other railways in Canada.
We're also concerned, very much, about the issue of misinterpretation of rail signals, which was mentioned also by Ms. Tadros. Modern signal indications, particularly on high-speed lines, such as in Burlington, are purely visual; there is no backup and they're very complex for the train crews to interpret and react to correctly. In this context, the recommendations from the TSB regarding video and audio monitoring of locomotive engineers in the cab, as well as the monitoring of what is in front of the train, which involves cameras looking forward, are very important.
We participated in a number of railway safety events. We submitted to the Railway Safety Act review panel, which reported back in 2007. We've appeared before the House of Commons, before this committee, on air safety. We've appeared before the Senate committee on the amendments to the Railway Safety Act, where we strongly supported the introduction of safety management systems.
In May last year we spoke at a conference of the International System Safety Society of Canada on system safety in rail transportation. We attended the Canadian Transportation Research Forum seminar in January of this year on rail safety and transporting dangerous goods in Canada and, as I mentioned also, the TRAQ conference in Quebec City last week.
Looking at another recommendation of the TSB that relates to alternate routes for dangerous goods transport, we have a strong concern right now about the abandonment of historical main railway lines which is putting our national rail system at risk. For example, when Canadian Pacific sold its line that used to operate through northern Maine to Saint John, New Brunswick, this essentially reduced our rail network to a single route east of Quebec City, which totally disrupted train transport between the port of Halifax and central Canada when a major derailment occurred in Montmagny a few years ago.
In the last two years we've seen abandonment of the historic transcontinental railway lines in the Ottawa Valley, leaving only trackage through the greater Toronto area to connect eastern and western Canada, with no alternate routes that avoid that populated area. This year we're about to see the abandonment of the historic Intercolonial Railway segment in New Brunswick between Newcastle and Bathurst, which will leave only one railway route into New Brunswick. We think that's an area which the federal government and Parliament should be concerned about.
Looking back at passenger transportation safety, which is our main concern, obviously, since the disastrous Hinton crash in 1986 when 23 people died, we've had a very good record with VIA Rail. VIA has actually only had three passenger fatalities in accidents since then: two at Coteau, Quebec, in 1992, and one at Biggar, Saskatchewan, in 1997. It has of course had accidents causing the deaths of train crews: the tragic loss of three lives in Burlington in 2012 and of two engineers in Kemptville, Ontario in 1999, but essentially travel by train in Canada is extremely safe.
With respect to technology investment, the railways must continue to invest in technology as well as in their processes for safety management systems. An example of the failure to do that was the Toronto subway accident in 1995 where 40-year-old automatic train-stop technology failed to operate correctly and there were three fatalities. That, of course, was not a federally regulated rail system, but it's still an example of what happens when you fail to go with the latest technology.
In fact, in other countries that do have modern technology for automatic train control, there have still been serious accidents where there were gaps or flaws in the system. The two most serious accidents were in Britain: at Ladbroke Grove in 1999, with 31 deaths when two trains collided head on because of a failure to observe signals and a failure to use the existing positive train control on that system; and an earlier accident in 1988 with 35 deaths, again involving a failure of an outdated signalling system. In Spain, the crash at Santiago de Compostela with a high number of fatalities last year was a result of a bad design interface on completely new track between two different and incompatible signalling systems. Investment in technology is important.
To wrap up, again, Transport Action supported the safety management systems in the Railway Safety Act. We did express in the past some concern about the resources of short-line railways particularly to afford the implementation of these measures, though the major railways clearly have been making the appropriate investments in introducing that safety culture. The Lac-Mégantic accident may in fact show a failure of the application of SMS, but we await the TSB report on that.
I will point out that those concerns, particularly about the ability of smaller companies to implement SMS, were previously raised by Mr. Justice Virgil Moshansky, who led the inquiry into the Air Ontario crash in Dryden, Ontario, in 1989, obviously long before this. Mr. Justice Moshansky expressed concerns to the Railway Safety Act review panel back in 2007 and more recently about whether the safety regime can be effectively implemented everywhere.
I think those are my main points, and I'd be happy to answer any questions.