Is Dianne Feinstein Responsible for the Amtrak Crash that Killed Eight? No, But Government Safety Mandates Can Have Tragic and Unintended Consequences.

Reason's Jim Epstein cites Marc Scribner's blog on the Philiadelphia Amtrak derailment: 

While it's true that PTC works better than ATC at preventing crashes, in a world of scarcity and tradeoffs, the most expensive and complicated system is often the worse choice. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Marc Scribner notes in a sharp piece on the lessons of last week's crash, all that extra money for PTC would have been better spent on improving grade crossings, where on average about 270 people are killed each year. Train derailments, by contrast, are incredibly rare.