WASHINGTON – The Surface Transportation Board on Thursday announced that it has selected a senior staff member, Neil Moyer, to coordinate the board’s efforts in preparing to meet new intercity passenger rail on-time performance responsibilities.
Moyer will work closely with board members and staff to develop a plan for on-time performance investigations. Among the tasks: Forming a unit at the STB focused on passenger rail issues and analysis. In his role as passenger rail unit development coordinator, Moyer’s work will build on that of the Passenger Rail Working Group, an interdisciplinary group of board employees formed in April to evaluate the resources the board needs to fulfill its on-time performance oversight responsibilities.
Moyer, currently passenger rail advisor in the STB’s Office of Public Assistance, Governmental Affairs, and Compliance, formerly served as chief of the Intercity Passenger Rail Analysis Division and of the Financial and Economic Analysis Division at the Federal Railroad Administration, where he managed the Commercial Feasibility Study of High-Speed Ground Transportation and was primary author of the study report, “High-Speed Ground Transportation for America.” .
“The selection of Neil Moyer to coordinate development of a passenger rail unit at the Board, and marshal other important resources, is a critical step in ensuring the Board’s preparedness to meet its important oversight and adjudicatory responsibilities with regard to passenger rail OTP,” Chairman Martin J. Oberman said.
“With the Board’s planning efforts well underway, I remain as confident as ever in the Board’s ability to meet its upcoming passenger rail OTP responsibilities and play its part in ensuring the service quality of the Nation’s intercity passenger rail system,” Oberman added.
Section 213 of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 (PRIIA) authorizes, and on eligible complaint requires, the STB to investigate the causes of substandard passenger rail OTP, to identify mitigating measures, and, under specified conditions, to prescribe relief.
In late 2020, the FRA, in conjunction with Amtrak, promulgated a “Customer OTP” metric to measure passenger rail OTP, with a standard requiring 80 percent of passenger arrivals at stations to occur within 15 minutes of the scheduled time for any two consecutive calendar quarters. This standard began to apply on July 1, 2021.
Because PRIIA requires as a precondition for an STB OTP investigation that there be two consecutive quarters of substandard OTP, there is a possibility that a complaint requesting an STB investigation could be submitted as early as January 2022. Complaints may be brought by Amtrak, by an entity for which Amtrak operates intercity passenger rail service, by an intercity passenger rail operator, or by a host freight railroad over which Amtrak operates.
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