Why Is Safer Rail Tech Still Waiting for a Green Light?

Regulations still require humans to redundantly perform work that automated track inspection already does better.

Automated track inspection (ATI) has been an unambiguous success story in rail safety innovation. It’s straightforward: mount lasers, sensors, and high-speed cameras on trains, scan every foot of track continuously, flag defects earlier, and prevent derailments. The Federal Railroad Administration has acknowledged these benefits in congressional testimony, and every Class I railroad now uses ATI because it works.

So why is ATI—more specifically, the American Association of Railroads’ waiver request to expand its use—still waiting for an answer from the FRA?

A recent Washington Examiner report by Christian Datoc explored this question, noting that the FRA is taking longer than expected to decide whether to expand automated inspection under a waiver filed this spring. That delay has raised eyebrows not because ATI is controversial, but because the technical case for it has been consistent for years and across administrations.

Datoc summarizes the situation this way:

“The Federal Railroad Administration is taking its time deciding a potential expansion of automated railroad track inspection technology… The decision itself involves a waiver… that would provide rail companies some exemptions from adhering to 1971’s regulations dictating the method and frequency at which railroads must be visually inspected for defects.”

In my own recent DC Journal op-ed, I described the broader pattern: regulators, unions, and other stakeholders sometimes align—intentionally or not—to slow the adoption of safety-enhancing technologies. ATI has become the clearest example, and it reminds me of Bruce Yandle’s famous Bootleggers and Baptists explanation for why we sometimes observe unlikely partners coalescing around certain regulatory policies.

But the current delay raises a genuine question: What is driving the holdup now? Several explanations deserve consideration.

Possibility 1: Union Pressure Still Matters

Some labor unions remain skeptical of expanded ATI use. They argue that ATI expansion could reduce inspection jobs and might not improve safety.

Datoc reports:

“Union members specifically argue that the expansion of the technology would not demonstrably improve rail safety and could potentially jeopardize inspection jobs.”

While in reality ATI tends to shift work toward repairs—because it finds more defects than manual inspection—it’s reasonable to assume unions still worry about long-term automation trends. Union opposition played a key role in slowing ATI waivers under the Biden administration, and it may be part of the timeline today as well.

Regulatory agencies rarely move quickly when influential stakeholders object.

Possibility 2: Federal Agencies Are Still Recovering From Shutdown Disruptions

Another possibility is simply bandwidth. DOT has been juggling a number of operational priorities, especially ongoing air traffic controller staffing shortages and post-shutdown disruptions.

ATI waiver decisions require careful technical review and legal vetting. If DOT staff have been focused on stabilizing aviation operations or responding to urgent system issues, it wouldn’t be surprising if lower-profile decisions are temporarily paused or slowed.

Possibility 3: The FRA Is Being Extra Cautious After Recent Litigation

ATI waivers have been the subject of major litigation. Most notably, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2023 that FRA’s rejection of BNSF Railway’s ATI expansion request was “arbitrary and capricious” and called the pilot program “an unqualified success.”

When an agency has been reversed in court, it often proceeds more cautiously the next time a similar issue comes up. The FRA may simply be building a more robust administrative record before issuing a decision—especially if it anticipates challenges from either carriers or unions.

A Broader Pattern: When Regulations Accumulate, Innovation Slows

Regardless of the reason for the current delay, ATI illustrates a larger systemic problem: regulations written for a very different era create friction and uncertainty for new technologies.

1970s visual-inspection rules force railroads into a waiver-based system. Waivers invite stakeholder disputes. Disputes invite litigation. Litigation encourages procedural caution. And all of this produces delay—even when the evidence for a new technology is positive, as FRA has repeatedly acknowledged.

This is the dynamic of regulatory accumulation: the interaction of many old rules and risk-averse processes that make it difficult for safer technologies to scale.

As I noted in my DC Journal piece:

“New, safer tools are often treated as presumptively risky until proven safe in every imagined scenario.”

ATI isn’t the only example of this dynamic. FRA has oscillated on crew-size mandates, for instance—withdrawn in 2019 because accident data didn’t support it, then revived in 2024 without new evidence—leading to ongoing legal challenges.

A More Predictable Path Forward

Rather than rely on one-off waivers that can be delayed for reasons ranging from political pressure to staff bandwidth constraints, we’d be better off with:

• Performance-based regulation.
If ATI meets or exceeds measurable safety benchmarks, then automated inspection should “count” for regulatory compliance.

• Transparent cost-benefit analysis before imposing or reversing major rules.
That applies to visual-inspection rules and crew-size mandates alike.

• Scalable regulatory sandboxes.
If a technology performs well in a structured pilot, it should automatically advance toward full approval—without needing to restart the process with every new administration.

These approaches would speed the adoption of safety-enhancing tools and reduce the burden on agencies that are already stretched thin.

A Moment for Clarity, Not Criticism

The central question isn’t why an administration is moving slowly, or which stakeholder bloc is influencing the timeline. It’s whether safety policy is being anchored to evidence.

ATI has a strong record. It has bipartisan technical support. And it has the potential to prevent derailments—something everyone agrees is a priority.

Whatever is driving the current delay—union concerns, agency workload, procedural caution, or some mix of all three—greater transparency would help. And clearer, performance-based rules would make future decisions far less dependent on politics, bandwidth, or administrative turnover.