Here are the benefits and costs from the "VSL in the WSJ" post:
The FRA puts the cost of upgrades at up to $13 billion for passenger and freight railroads. …
It is tough to draw direct comparisons of train passenger safety to other types of travel, according to the Department of Transportation. For instance, the definition of a travel fatality varies. With automobiles, it is a death from injuries up to 30 days after a crash; for trains it is up to a year.
The American Public Transportation Association, an industry group, says that, for cars, about 1.4 people died for every 100 million passenger-miles traveled from 2003 through 2008, federal data show. For commuter rail, the figure was 0.06 deaths and for Amtrak, 0.03.
Overall in the past decade, FRA statistics show, 56 passengers and employees have died in incidents on mainline track, not including people or cars struck at grade crossings. …
Executive orders signed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama require federal agencies to perform cost-benefit analyses when imposing some new rules and mandates. For regulations designed to prevent fatalities, that means calculating the economic benefit of preserving a life. …
The switch to VSL raised the dollar value on preserving a human life. Among other things, that made costlier safety regulations easier to justify on economic grounds. …
To calculate the value of life for a given government regulation, agencies use wage, consumer-purchase and job-safety data to calculate the premium already built into economic data to account for relative riskiness. So economists deduce from people's willingness to pay for safety features—say, air bags—how much they value lowering the risk of death.
From there, economists extrapolate the VSL, the economic value of saving a single life. Back in 2009, the Department of Transportation put that number at $6 million; today it is calculated at $9.1 million.
via online.wsj.com
Suppose the $13 billion cost of safety upgrades saves 168 (56 x 3) lives over the next 30 years. The undiscounted benefit is $1.5 billion (168 x $9.1m), an order of magnitude lower than the costs. It is hard to imagine how any other safety co-benefits could push the benefits much higher. What is worse is that the money could be spent on what is described as more pressing safety concerns (click on the slideshow tab).
*I stole that title from my friend George.
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