PTC technology wasn’t in use thanks to our political leaders’ refusal to invest in our infrastructure.

Yesterday Cal policy professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich used the fatal Metro-North train derailment in New York City as an opportunity to offer up some thoughts on the sorry state of America’s infrastructure, a topic my Scholars & Rogues colleague Dr. Denny has written about a number of times. It sparked a bit of sniping on one of my Facebook threads.

Denny insisted that we ought to wait on the investigation to tell us what happened before blaming the infrastructure. Another commenter, unfamiliar with Denny’s work, tried to take him to task for failing to understand how bad the infrastructure really is.

I finally got it all settled down and by the end of the conversation the news broke that the crash resulted from the train taking a curve with a 30 mph speed limit at 82 mph. So it wasn’t an infrastructure failure, it was operator error (and here’s where I’m trying, without much success, to avoid making cracks about the newly vacant leading man role Fast & Furious franchise).

But a couple hours later I got to thinking. Surely there is some kind of auto-braking technology out there that would slowed the train down when (as is now being reported) the conductor “nodded off.” Given the state of technical innovation, it not only makes sense that such a thing has to exist, you’d probably even assume, if you stopped to think about it, that most trains have it installed.

So, I pondered – what if the crash were both operator error and infrastructure failure? What if, I posted on Facebook, the technology does exist but it wasn’t on that train as a result of our failure to invest in the infrastructure?

Then, this morning we get this: Could Metro-North train crash have been avoided with federally-mandated positive train control system?

…some safety experts say the tragedy might not have happened if Metro-North had what’s called positive train control (PTC) technology.

The wreck came just two years before the federal government’s deadline for Metro-North and other railroads to install the automatic-slowdown technology, which is designed to prevent catastrophic accidents. CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy reports Congress ordered the system be installed across the country after a commuter train slammed head-on into a freight train in Chatsworth, California, in 2008, killing 25 people in one of the deadliest train wrecks in that state’s history.

Congress passed measures requiring PTC be installed on 60,000 miles of rail lines in the U.S. at a total cost of about $10 billion. Jeff Lustgarten with Metrolink in California told CBS News the “life saving technology” is worth it. He described it as “a very elaborate state of the art GPS-based technology, which allows our trains to be controlled remotely.”

Aha. I was right. The technology exists and it wasn’t installed on this train. But…why not? Oh, here’s why:

MTA and other railroad entities who are behind in implementing PTC blame the cost and size of the project.

In other words, if we were diligently investing in our infrastructure over the course of the past 20+ years, then there is every reason to wonder if this crash might not have happened.

That’s lesson #1. Lesson #2, though, is potentially even more important. Whenever something blows up and people get killed, investigations frequently conclude that the cause was “human error.” Sometimes it is, of course. People are fallible. People fall asleep at the wheel. People get liquored up and operate heavy machinery. We all know this.

But sometimes human error is a convenient excuse for a deeper institutional problem. Put simply, the chances of human error increase dramatically in situations where the technology is flawed. When the technology is up to date, when it is outfitted with the latest in precautionary functionality and failsafes, the risk of damage from human error drops substantially.

In other words, viewed broadly, what happened on that Metro-North line wasn’t human error. It was policy error. It was a political error. It looks like the blame happened because a tired operator fell asleep, but had a generation of politicians behaved responsibly and invested in our infrastructure, that train and every other train would have had PTC installed.

The lesson, then, is to listen and think critically. The next time something goes wrong and you’re told that it was human error, stop and ask yourself if that’s the whole story. Was human error the cause, or is it the excuse that elected and regulatory officials are pandering so that we won’t look too closely at the deeper problems facing our infrastructure?