Opinion: How much safety are rails willing to pay for?

When a train derails and people die, as happened Dec. 1 in New York, there are going to be lots of questions. Eventually, there will be answers to most. But will anyone be able to answer this question: How much are the lives of train passengers worth?

On Dec. 2, as investigators probed the crash of a Metro-North Railroad commuter train that left four passengers dead, there were reports that the train’s engineer, William Rockefeller, had “zoned out” at the time of the crash. The train was going 82 miles per hour around a 30-mph curve when it derailed.

Read the complete story at the Los Angeles Times.