You know you’re becoming a regulation-for-the-sake-of-regulation state when even The Economist — whose current staff have never met an EU regulation they didn’t love to pieces — can correctly poke fun at you for your obsessive over-regulation of everything:
Americans love to laugh at ridiculous regulations. A Florida law requires vending-machine labels to urge the public to file a report if the label is not there. The Federal Railroad Administration insists that all trains must be painted with an “F” at the front, so you can tell which end is which. Bureaucratic busybodies in Bethesda, Maryland, have shut down children’s lemonade stands because the enterprising young moppets did not have trading licences. The list goes hilariously on.
But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively. America is meant to be the home of laissez-faire. Unlike Europeans, whose lives have long been circumscribed by meddling governments and diktats from Brussels, Americans are supposed to be free to choose, for better or for worse. Yet for some time America has been straying from this ideal.
[. . .]
Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. Examples range from the merely annoying (eg, a proposed code for nurseries in Colorado that specifies how many crayons each box must contain) to the delusional (eg, the conceit of Dodd-Frank that you can anticipate and ban every nasty trick financiers will dream up in the future). Far from preventing abuses, complexity creates loopholes that the shrewd can abuse with impunity.
The other force that makes American laws complex is lobbying. The government’s drive to micromanage so many activities creates a huge incentive for interest groups to push for special favours. When a bill is hundreds of pages long, it is not hard for congressmen to slip in clauses that benefit their chums and campaign donors. The health-care bill included tons of favours for the pushy. Congress’s last, failed attempt to regulate greenhouse gases was even worse.
Isn’t the F on diesel locomotives there to indicate the default front orientation of the locomotive? See http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=1006012408101 for some notes on this.
The F is not to designate the front of the train, but to designate the normal forward facing direction of the locomotive. When configuring multiple units to run together — and when some of those units might be facing “backwards” — it’s probably important to know the orientation of the units. For locomotives without an obvious “front” — like this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_GP9 — the F designation is probably important. For locomotives like the GP9, some roads ordered them in different configurations; some roads designated the long hood as the front.
It’s always amusing to see snark from a journalist who has not done any sort of technical research into why a convention or regulation, if the F is indeed a government regulation, is in place. I’m going to guess that the Economist author would also mock the red and green navigation lights on aircraft, accusing the lights of looking rather Christmas-y and thus carrying a hidden message.
Comment by Lickmuffin — February 17, 2012 @ 11:36
And the “F” notation on the locomotives has been required for how many decades? It hardly qualifies as “new” if the regulation has been in place since before the writer was born… I suspect (without resorting to Google or Wikipedia) that this was mandated sometime around 1945-1950, as diesels took over the majority of passenger and freight traffic on US railways.
Comment by Nicholas — February 17, 2012 @ 11:49
And the “F” notation on the locomotives has been required for how many decades?
I live by a busy line, my office is just feet from a feeder line. I see trains all the time: never have seen an ‘F’ on the front of a locomotive.
Probably I have not been paying attention – I’ll eyeball the next train that rolls by, see what comes up.
Comment by Brian Dunbar — February 23, 2012 @ 15:29
It’s not easy to spot at a distance. Look for a capital “F” close to one end at the bottom of the body of the locomotive as in this randomly chosen example from Google images — http://www.budd-rdc.org/sets/photos/drm12.png or this one from Wikimedia — https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/3801_EMD_GP38-2_diesel_locomotive.jpg
Comment by Nicholas — February 23, 2012 @ 15:50
Look for a capital “F”
That’s what everyone is making a big deal about?
Seems like a needless matter for the FRA to get involved in. If you can’t tell which way is ‘forward’ on an engine then … it’s not a benefit to the train company to slap an ‘F’ on their engine in the right spot?
All by itself, not a big deal. A few seconds with a stencil and you’re done. But regs build on regs .. a generation later it’s hard to diff the trivial and stupid from the needed.
OTOH I don’t work in a trainyard so this might be a big deal to those guys.
Comment by Brian Dunbar — February 23, 2012 @ 16:56