WASHINGTON — The Surface Transportation Board today proposed streamlining and improving reporting requirements for Class I rail carriers, including the weekly operational performance measures that serve as a network bellwether.
The board aims to improve the quality of performance data that the railroads report each week. It also proposes adding two new service measures: An original estimated time of arrival metric and an industry spot and pull metric.
“Rail service reliability is essential to the economy, and the Board prioritizes monitoring rail service for emerging issues so that it can act promptly to address them,” the board said in its decision, noting that the additional metrics would allow regulators to better monitor service reliability.
The ETA metric would require railroads to report the percentage of weekly manifest shipments that were delivered to destination no later than 24 hours after the original estimated time of arrival.
The spot and pull metric would measure the quality of a railroad’s local switching service, both overall and broken down by geography on each system.
Both metrics were added temporarily to weekly reporting requirements during the 2022 service crisis.
The board’s proposal also would eliminate the reporting of positive train control expenses. The rail industry completed implementation of PTC nationwide on Dec. 29, 2020, yet the board has continued to collect data. The proposal would eliminate the reporting requirement in recognition that it’s burdensome.
The STB also aims to simplify and standardize the reporting process by providing templates.
The agency also will launch online tools that will allow shippers, regulators, and the public to create customized data queries.
“The Board’s website presents agency data largely as spreadsheet attachments that require manual aggregation across time periods, railroads, and other variables. The Board has procured more advanced computing tools that will enable the agency and public, including shippers, to interact with the data more easily, facilitating fast and low-burden customized queries and outputs to help better understand network performance and health and drive decision-making. The Board expects to begin to roll out an enhanced mechanism for accessing data in the first half of 2026,” the decision says.
Comments on the proposals are due by Oct. 30, with replies due by Nov. 15.
