The Trump administration Monday reportedly repealed a safety rule requiring new trains carrying crude oil to use electronically controlled pneumatic brakes instead of air brakes, citing its high cost.
The Department of Transportation's Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration did a congressionally mandated analysis of the 2015 regulation, The Hill reported.
"The Department [of Transportation] determined that the expected benefits, including safety benefits, of implementing ECP brake system requirements do not exceed the associated costs of equipping tank cars with ECP brake systems, and therefore are not economically justified," the agency said, The Hill reported.
The mandate to phase out traditional air brakes for crude oil transportation use was part of a comprehensive rule the Obama administration wrote in 2015 to improve the safety of crude oil trains.
But the brake mandate became a top target for the railroad and oil industries in pushing back against parts of the 2015 rule, The Hill reported.
Congress, in the bipartisan Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act of 2016, told the agency to conduct a new cost-benefit analysis of the brake provision. If the costs outweighed the benefits, the agency was required to repeal it, The Hill reported.