Evidence of meeting #9 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was bnsf.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
We're just over the five-minute mark. We're trying to make sure that the committee has sufficient time for questioning, given the fact that we have short panels.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Can I give you another minute? If there is anything pressing that you want to say in that minute, go ahead. Otherwise, you can respond through the question and answer period.
Chief, Transportation and Safety Office, VIA Rail Canada Inc.
Well, I'd like to say prior to closing that safety is incredibly important to us.
I will leave it to the question period to make other statements.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Thank you very much.
Mr. Percy with GO Transit for five minutes, please.
Greg Percy President, GO Transit
Thank you.
First of all, GO Transit is part of Metrolinx. It's a crown agency of the province. Metrolinx would include UP Express, our new airport rail link; GO Transit; and Presto. I will speak on behalf of those also.
Safety is very important not just to the industry, but also certainly to major players like VIA Rail Canada and GO Transit and UP Express. We have this commitment to safety. It's part of the GO and UP culture. That's to the benefit of our customers, employees, contractors, and also for the communities through which we operate. We actually own 80% of our operating network, so that's a responsibility we take very seriously. We have been fortunate to have a great safety record since our inception of 1967, and we look forward to continuing that.
We embed the commitment to safety in our passenger charter, which was precedent-setting when introduced some six years ago. We have an explicit set of promises in terms of the safety we provide to our customers, and we look forward to continuing that process. It's one of those things where you just can't take your eye off the ball. You have to keep reinvesting time and energy to make sure safety matters.
Lastly, we have a safety management system also, as required by Transport Canada. That gets updated every year, and we make sure we live up to those commitments also.
On our community contribution, we do education outreach. We reach into the schools. That's really important. It's important to get to the kids before they get to the tracks. We take that very seriously. We did something in the last year that was quite unique—I believe a precedent to the industry. We partnered with ConnexOntario, another agency of the province, and put up signs at all of our level crossings, stations, and bridges, basically for a health line for those who are desperate with mental health issues. We have had some feedback that it has saved lives as well. We're quite proud of that, and we're hoping that it rolls out to the industry. We already have some interest through CUTA and CN, but we'd like to roll that out right across Canada.
Many of the things we do centre on safety and customer service, but safety is always first, whether in terms of how we build our crew shifts or how we build our equipment. We have been one of the first to embrace the in-cab, video-audio recorders. We have started changing our fleet over, and as soon as they're changed over, we turn them on. We expect to have our fleet turned on by the end of this year. We think this is a very important step forward for us, and we hope that the industry does it also.
As for some of the other areas, we look internationally to see the appropriate best practices of other agencies, not just in North America but outside North America, to see what the right things are, any of which we can reverse-engineer into our operation.
With respect to dangerous goods, for example, we have made some recommendations through the Canada Transportation Act panel. I won't go over those. Many of you may already have read some of them. As an entity that owns 80% of its network, we have an obligation, and it's a fairly unique one, to host such trains carrying dangerous goods. So we've had some early conversation with Transport Canada on what those obligations are.
In terms of other things we do, because we own our operating network, or 80% of it, we wound up contracting to Transport Canada to regulate us on our own network. They felt it was outside their jurisdiction, so we actually chose...and we just renewed for two more years with Transport Canada, inviting them to come onto our corridor, inspect our operating crews, inspect our equipment and the actual right of way. We think this is a good step forward. We don't think self-regulation is the level of safety that we want. We think strong safety is good public policy, and we and our behaviour support that.
For our own corridors we don't wait until we're told what the minimum safety level is in terms of lights, bells and gates. We actually go to maximum protection at all our level crossings.
We are very quick to react should there be any state of disrepair. We think this is very important.
The industry responds to slow orders. Should there be any track specific issues, it's important to react quickly to those also. Of course, the industry tries to do that.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Thank you very much, Mr. Percy. If you could hold onto your last comments and include them in response to any of the questions that will asked of you, we can then stay on track and on time.
Thank you all very much.
Ms. Block, for six minutes, please.
Conservative
Kelly Block Conservative Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK
I want to thank our witnesses for joining us through video conference. It's not always easy to testify in that way, but thank you so much for joining us.
I did note it was VIA Rail that mentioned the fact that federally regulated passenger railways are subject to the Railway Safety Act, its regulations and rules. What proactive safety measure are VIA Rail and GO Transit presently taking?
Chief, Transportation and Safety Office, VIA Rail Canada Inc.
Is that directed to VIA Rail?
Conservative
Chief, Transportation and Safety Office, VIA Rail Canada Inc.
With proactive measures, we monitor and measure the performance of our locomotive engineers thousands of hours a month. We monitor every train speed, every day, with our PSI system that monitors all of our high-speed corridor trains. We measure speed every day.
Our performance compliance and rules monitoring system results are at 99.8%.
We also work closely with all industry partners through the Railway Association of Canada to implement all safety measures necessary.
We've implemented a new passenger specific training program for locomotive engineers that was implemented last September, focusing more on human factors, with the help of human factor experts.
We participate in studies of locomotive voice and video recording with the Transportation Safety Board to try and implement whatever we can to assist us in our safety management system.
I have more. I could keep going if you like.
Conservative
Kelly Block Conservative Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK
We'll allow our other witness, Mr. Percy, to provide an answer, if he would like.
President, GO Transit
As I said, Metrolinx embraces the whole notion of enhanced safety. We recruit APTA, the American Passenger Transportation Association, to come up and interrogate our systems for the appropriate levels of safety. They create a report, to which we respond. We do that and cycle it every three to four years.
In the last two weeks, we started a program about rail safety, sponsored by the Railway Association of Canada. The association does interviews top to bottom in the organization to get a sense of the safety culture. Then they come through with recommendations on things that should be done differently.
We are in the planning stages of rapid growth for GO Transit, where our services will increase dramatically. An assumption of this large program is enhanced train control, which is taking the positive train control that is being put in place in the United States and increasing it even further. Enhanced train control takes a certain amount of human intervention out of train management and train operation. We think that with the higher frequencies we're expected to deliver, that is a basic condition that we have to include.
Conservative
Kelly Block Conservative Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK
My next question will be for VIA Rail. One of the focuses of this study has been fatigue management. How long is the average engineering crew shift at VIA Rail, and does VIA Rail use on-call scheduling?
Chief, Transportation and Safety Office, VIA Rail Canada Inc.
The schedules, naturally, will vary, depending on the region in which we operate. For our high-speed corridor between Quebec City and Windsor, the schedules for a trip would be between three and six hours. They get a rest period between that and their next assignment, so the hours are not long. We're a very scheduled railway—80% of our crews are on very fixed schedules, which helps us tremendously in managing fatigue.
We present every work schedule to the union on a quarterly basis. We call it a safety workshop. We show every work schedule we have. We show the schedules in which we had to take remedial action because of a situation out of our control. We want to make sure that we never go over the allotted time. Locomotive engineers are permitted to book rest whenever they deem necessary, if they don't feel fit to take their trip.
In short, we're very proactive when it comes to fatigue management. We have also developed a new scheduling method to meet the requirements of section 28 of the safety management system regulations, published last year. We have also added a new technology and are in phase one of its implementation. It's a technology that will help us measure and monitor in real time the number of hours worked by locomotive engineers. They will be able to anticipate when their next schedule will be when they are on the spare board, so they can prepare themselves accordingly and get enough rest before their next assignment.
Liberal
Gagan Sikand Liberal Mississauga—Streetsville, ON
Mr. Percy, the GO system's capacity is a million people per week. I'm curious how that compares with the volume of other cities or other systems.
Could you name a few?
President, GO Transit
GO Transit is the third-largest in North America behind MTA, the New York family of commuter agencies, and behind New Jersey Transit. So we're a big player. We make 70 million passenger trips per year. This coming year, we'll grow somewhere between 1% and 2%, and look forward through our rapid service expansion to increasing our handling by between 200% and 300%. So we need the safety network we've designed.
Liberal
Gagan Sikand Liberal Mississauga—Streetsville, ON
Do you have any figures for outside North America?
Liberal
Gagan Sikand Liberal Mississauga—Streetsville, ON
We've identified that a lot of the accidents happen at crossings. I know there was a fatal accident in Milton this past year. I have been on a GO train when someone has lost their life, specifically on the Milton line. Could you offer some suggestions for making crossings safer for the million passengers you carry and those outside the trains?
President, GO Transit
Ultimately, the correct level of safety comes from grade separation between the roads and the rails. With the embracing of commuter and passenger operations, we really need to separate cars and rail.
Level crossings have some inherent safety risk. They vary by location and by angle, but ultimately that's where we need to go. GO alone has almost 200 level crossings, and every year we chip away at separating the grades. But we need a massive program to separate grades throughout the operation. For our own level crossings, we go to the max with lights, bells, and gates. Whether or not this is warranted by the thresholds specified by Transport Canada, we do it anyway because we think it's the right thing to do.
Awareness is also important. To this end, we are working with Operation Lifesaver. It's important to work through the railway association on this. Education is a big part of what we do.
There are other types of fatalities. Level crossings are generally the access point for trespassers, people who are trying to get across the tracks before the trains arrive. That's highly risky. Again, education is really important, but the number-one solution is to separate the grades between the rails and the roads.
Liberal
Gagan Sikand Liberal Mississauga—Streetsville, ON
Could you please share your thoughts on providing all-day, two-way service on that Milton line as well, because at the moment it's just one way in the peak hours.