The death toll in the Los Angeles train collision last week climbed to 26 on Monday, while over 135 people are still recovering from crash injuries. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) revealed that all signals functioned properly prior to the collision, which raises a serious question: what are the chances for such an accident to repeat itself?

According to railroad officials and lawmakers, we are still years away from implementing an efficient safety system that would prevent trains from passing stop signals. The NTSB website describes the plan to implement Positive Train Control systems (that would automatically override mistakes made by human operators) to be progressing slowly.

At the same time, the plan to reduce accidents and incidents cause by human fatigue (although this doesn’t seem to be the case), which would require railroads to use scientifically based principles when assigning work schedules for train crewmembers, is “progressing in a timely manner.”

In order to implement these ideas, rail companies need to make the necessary investments. As Rep. James Oberstar of the House transportation committee pointed out, the accident was preventable.

“Our legislation requiring PTC (Positive Train Control) would substantially reduce the number of serious train accidents, because it provides safety redundancy to protect against human performance failures,” Oberstar said. “However, the unwillingness of rail companies to make the needed investments in safety, have prevented this technology from being fully implemented.”

The PTC system relies on global positioning satellites, train systems and signals, as well as computer programs, to prevent human errors from producing tragedies such as the LA one. Oberstar urged the Congress to pass a rail safety bill requiring the implementation of the Positive Train Control systems: “increasing safety on America’s railroads is simply too important to ignore any longer.”