The U.S. has two primary modes of freight transportation. The first killed nearly 5,500 Americans in 2023, increasing 43 percent over the past decade, accounting for over 80 percent of all freight-related deaths. The second killed five—not five thousand, not five hundred—just five. The first is large trucks, the second is rail.
In its infinite wisdom, Congress is considering enacting costly legislation focused on reducing the latter number—and has no plans to address the former.
As Congress prepares to reauthorize surface transportation programs before the September 2026 deadline, the recently reintroduced Railway Safety Act would impose billions of dollars in new prescriptive mandates on freight rail, including a two-man crew minimum. Simultaneously, Congress is actively debating whether to allow autonomous trucks on our highways, which is a considerably more complex and dynamic system for autonomous vehicles.
The Railway Safety Act is best seen as a direct response to the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment in February 2023. While the incident was an unsettling and disruptive event for the community, no one died from that derailment. The Norfolk Southern railroad ultimately paid a settlement of more than $600 million to affected residents.
The threat of large settlement payouts like what occurred in East Palestine shows why railroads spend enormous sums to promote safety, and the system is working: Rail accidents have dropped 44 percent since 2000, and the Federal Railroad Administration just declared 2025 the safest year in the history of U.S. freight rail. It—rightly—calls the American rail network the safest in the world.
Despite these successes, the Railway Safety Act would impose obsolete and costly technology safety mandates despite the fact that the industry has already adopted more effective rail technologies. Safety policy works best when it’s based on data and technological innovation rather than post hoc response to a single incident.
Congress is also considering laws that would repeal the excise tax on heavy trucks and trailers which are exactly the trucks that cause the most damage to our roads. Trucks are responsible for 90 percent of road deterioration, they generate ten times more greenhouse gases per ton than trains, and already cost taxpayers more than $40 billion a year in general-fund transfers to the Highway Trust Fund—a subsidy that has grown steadily since the gasoline and diesel fuel taxes were frozen at 18 and 22 cents per gallon in 1993. Eliminating the excise tax on heavy trucks will widen every one of those gaps.
Finally, despite an already abysmal truck safety record, Congress is also actively considering reducing training requirements for obtaining a CDL license.
The critical connection being overlooked in this debate is modal substitution: When regulations make rail more expensive through speed restrictions, crew mandates, hazmat reclassifications, and new inspection mandates, shippers respond rationally by moving freight to trucks, which Congress is actively making less expensive. Every percentage point shift from rail to truck increases overall risk to the public. Chemicals that travel safely by rail do not vanish when the rail economics become unfavorable—they travel by truck instead.
The best way to describe our government’s priorities in freight safety would be as incoherent. Alternatively, it could be interpreted as anti-rail and pro-truck, which is counter to the best interests of the American public in any way it is measured.
The appropriate message for Congress in this reauthorization is that it should not impose new prescriptive mandates on rail freight, which is already performing beyond expectations, while simultaneously giving trucks a tax break, and allowing them to operate autonomously or with undertrained drivers.
There is a straightforward test for any freight safety regulation: Will this policy reduce total American fatalities across all modes, accounting for the fact that freight will shift to roads? For the Railway Safety Act's crew mandates, wayside detector requirements, and expanded hazmat definitions, the honest answer is no.
Congress can do better, and it should start by asking which mode actually should be scritinized. It is not the one with five deaths a year.
