MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said that "crappy" and "horrible" Amtrak management is to blame for the train that derailed in Philadelphia on Tuesday, killing seven people and injuring at least 200 others.
The "Morning Joe" panel opened the conversation Thursday morning talking about experts who say existing technology could have prevented the crash entirely -- it's a system known as Positive Train Control (PTC), which monitors and controls speed limits and can automatically slow down trains if a driver is going too fast.
“If we have this technology -- we had this tragedy in Philadelphia, we had this tragedy on Metro North -- why don’t we have [this technology] in place?" Scarborough said. "This is not complex!”
“There’s horrible mismanagement here,” he continued.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said the problem stems from a lack of funding for infrastructure, and said if Congress had implemented this technology earlier, the crash could have been avoided.
Scarborough cut him off, arguing that funding is not the only problem.
“The answer’s not always a bigger check,” Scarborough argued. “That’s always the answer when something bad happens. We have a massive four-and-a-half trillion dollar budget every year. We can’t afford this to save lives in Philadelphia?”
The panel then spoke to David Rangel, President of Modoc Railroad Academy, who said the answer to preventing these tragedies is actually very low-tech: The solution, he said, is to simply put one more person in the train cab to accompany the driver.
“It can be implemented this afternoon -- implemented in an hour,” he said.
“It’s amazing,” co-host Mika Brzezinski responded. “One person.”