Trains don’t kill, people do — that’s perfectly clear from the latest Metrolink tragedy and the terrible record of carnage on the Long Beach Blue Line.
Here’s the facts: Metrolink has “one of the worst fatality records of any commuter rail system in the nation” with 74 fatalities this decade and the Blue Line has recorded 90
fatalities, 64 involved pedestrians, 26 vehicles, none train passengers.
That’s what happens when you do things on the cheap. Safety last might well be the motto for the L.A. transit system.
The blood on the tracks around L.A. is the inevitable
consequence of building a rail system at grade for the most part in a heavily-congested urban area. Subways, trenches, elevateds, grade separations are the rule almost everywhere else but not L.A.
And since we refuse to learn from our past mistakes, we are condemned to repeat them. The Expo Line now under construction from downtown to Culver City and the Westside is a prime example.
Damien Goodmon of the Fix Expo Citizen’s Campaign has organized the community into an effective force to fight against street-level crossings, particularly in the area around Dorsey High School where hundreds of students have to cross the tracks every morning and afternoon.
He warns of the certainty of deadly accidents in the area and recently wrote: “MTA/Expo Authority don’t have public support for their unsafe street level crossings…We
need mass transit solutions, but it has to be done right, and done
safely, and the impacts should be equitable across all directly
adjacent residential communities.”
His campaign has been so successful that the 
Expo Authority, set up by the MTA as a separate agency, is fighting back with its own organizing and information operation run by Dakota Communications, the same firm that used such hardball tactics in the Sunland-Tujunga/Home Depot controversy that the community became inflamed and became highly organized.
I talked at length recently with Expo Authority spokeswoman Samantha Bricker who argued Fix Expo was engaged in a campaign of “disinformation” and the record had to be set straight so Dakota was hired for its expertise in community outreach.
She patiently and carefully took me though how the costs of Phase I of the project had jumped a third to $860 million and how it was now on track in terms of budget and completion in 2010. As she explained it, the reasons seemed rational enough as did why the line goes underground at Flower and above ground in Culver City.
What interested me most was the idea that some kind of bizarre concept of social equity is in play:
“We’re meeting all the requirements of state and federal agencies for safety at the crossings,” she told me. “But even apart from the costs involved, it wouldn’t be fair. We had to use the same standards that applied to the Gold Line and the Blue Line.”
Isn’t that the point? Isn’t it why the community around Dorsey High is up in arms and Westsiders are already organized and ready for war over design for at-grade crossings for Phase II of the Expo Line?
We got it wrong in the first place because our leaders don’t care about the consequences of their actions.
They built the Blue Line on the cheap so they could put most of the money available into the subway from downtown to the Westside. But they only got as far as Hollywood since the Westside didn’t want it for reasons that we don’t need to go into.
They only got just over the hill to the Valley because they used community opposition to save money for the Gold Line. So they built the Orange Line busway on the cheap at grade.
And now they want $40 billion in sales taxes to build the “subway-to-the-sea” while leaving everybody else at risk of death when they cross the tracks and stuck in traffic congestion because the public transit system is grossly inadequate.
That’s not a vision for easing traffic congestion or for protecting the lives of the people.
Building at grade…
Well, subways are too expensive; and,
If they built an elevated line there would be all the complaints of visual blight, compromised sight-lines, & the usual NIMBY crap.
Damned if the do, Damned if they don’t.
The mayor has appointed Richard Katz to the Metrolink Board. My guess is that he’s going to go in there with a machine gun.
From the git-go, I’m not on anybody’s side here. I’m just trying to look at these stats and trying to figure out just how misleading they might be.
Let’s look at those casualty figures a little more closely, which we can’t really do, because there’s not enough breakdown of the types of accidents.
Any accident, fatal or not, that occurred because an idiot raced the train and broke through the barricade or ignored the dinging, flash red lights is automatically out of the mix.
Their deaths are the fault of their own stupidity or derring-do, not any inadequacies in the system or design.
All pedestrian deaths are don’t count. When was the last time, first time or any time that we heard of a train chasing down a victim? Any pedestrian-involved accident has got to be first, last and always the ped’s fault.
Even if a ped were racing across the tracks to beat a train and his foot got caught, it’s still his fault.
Around a high school some precautions and a little education are needed. We all know that high schoolers are frequently as dumb as boulders. They’re nothing but a bunch of raging hormones in nearly adult bodies with the brains of nine-year-old and totally disfunctional judgment centers in their skulls.
They’ll race across tracks on a dare. They think they’re immortal and can go up against anything, even a zillion ton train, and survive. Some of them, especially any on the track team, might even think they’re faster than a ‘speeding train.’
Then there’s suicide by train, which we have no idea how many fall into that category.
My guess is that of all those cited stats, maybe between one- and five-percent can be chalked off to mechanical flaws, design or train personnel errors.
Just for the fun of it, I’d like to see these stats compared to the old Red Car stats. The street cars lumbered along in the middle of the street and riders had to dodge cars to get to the waiting areas which were islands in the middle of the avenues. So when it came to the trolley cars, there were dangers everywhere.
And it wasn’t for lack of safety or flawed design that we got rid of one of the country’s best transit systems. But that’s a whole ‘nuther story.
Villar, as usual, blamed the motorists (victims) in all of these cases involving the Orange Line…for running red lights when in fact it was the excessive speed of the buses that caused most of the accidents! Many of the victims were elderly and were not even aware of the Orange Line!!! THEY WERE TOO CHEAP TO INSTALL FLASHING LIGHTS OR AUTOMATIC ARM DROPS! They were sending innocent people to the slaughter!
In the case of the Metrolink crash…why wasn’t the speed reduced from 40 mph to 5 mph at least until the trains passed through the tunnel???? SPEED KILLS! This tragedy could have been easily prevented on so many levels, and I hope heads will roll at Metrolink! They deserve everything that’s coming their way!!! They have NO defense…unless it is proven that Sanchez died of a heart attack seconds before the crash…and that seems highly improbable!
Our city is being run by incompetent criminals who really should be behind bars. Our lives are constantly on the line – whether it be from gangbangers, robberies, burglaries, drive-bys, drunk drivers, illegal drivers, or public transit. LA has got to be one of the top 3 most unsafe cities to live in!!!!
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VILLAR BLAMES VICTIMS FOR ALL ORANGE LINE ACCIDENTS!!!!!!!!!
L. A. Times Archive for Friday, November 04, 2005
Orange Line Model Beset by Crashes
By Amanda Covarrubias and Caitlin Liu
November 04, 2005
When San Fernando Valley residents and others expressed worries about the potential for accidents on the Orange Line, transit officials repeatedly assured them the busway would be safe – and pointed to a similar transit system in Miami as evidence.
But the Miami busway had in fact been plagued with accidents when it first opened – some similar to those the Orange Line has experienced since opening last week, according to records and interviews.
It was only after the Miami system reduced its bus speeds and made other safety improvements that accidents declined. Now, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority has adopted one similar measure: slowing down Orange Line buses as they go through intersections.
On Thursday, Orange Line buses crawled through the route’s 36 crossings at 10 mph – a new MTA policy instituted after two accidents Wednesday resulted in 15 injuries. Before, the buses were allowed to travel 25 to 30 mph through crossings.
The Miami busway is an eight-mile route built on a former railway that parallels a highway and intersects streets. Between its February 1997 opening and November 2000, 67 crashes occurred on busway intersections, resulting in dozens of injuries and two deaths, according to a National Bus Rapid Transit Institute report.
The crashes so concerned Florida officials that they required the buses to slow down, first from a top speed of 45 mph through crossings to 15 mph, and finally to stopping outright at major intersections.
They also turned off the corridor’s signal priority system, which meant the buses had to wait for red lights just like regular cross-traffic.
Since those measures were adopted, accidents along the Miami busway have dropped significantly, said Manuel Palmeiro, a spokesman for Miami-Dade Transit, which runs the service.
Still, a 2002 MTA environmental impact report for the Orange Line touted the Miami busway as “an example of safety performance.” The report also said the Orange Line would actually be a better system, with “additional safety measures
During the review process for the Orange Line, some concerned residents cited the accidents on the Miami busway. The MTA responded in a 2004 report, saying it had “taken every precaution to design the Orange Line in as safe a manner as members of the traffic engineering and civil engineering professions know how to do.”
The report said the Orange Line would include dedicated turning lanes, signage and other safety features – but was silent on one of the key changes Miami made on its system: reducing the buses’ speed.
It was only recently that the MTA considered doing so.
After an MTA delegation visited the Miami busway a few months ago, the rank-and-file employees overseeing bus driver training began requiring drivers to not cruise through intersections at normal posted speed limits, about 35 mph, but to “cover their brakes” with their foot as their buses enter a crossing, slowing the buses to about 25 to 30 mph.
Jose Ubaldo, a spokesman for the MTA, declined Thursday to talk about the reports and their references to the Miami busway, saying the agency was focused on the Orange Line.
Some transportation experts said the Miami experience should have given the MTA a clear idea of what to expect when the Orange Line opened.
Joel Volinski, director of the National Center for Transit Research at the University of South Florida, said he and two researchers flew to Los Angeles a few months ago to examine the Orange Line while it was still under construction over a former rail right-of-way.
He said they were astounded by the similarities between the two busways, including unusual rail-like crossings, with a few streets intersecting at odd angles, sometimes requiring motorists to make extra-wide turns onto nearby cross streets.
“It’s pretty predictable what’s happening in L.A.,” Volinski said.
Added James E. Moore II, director of the Transportation Engineering Program at USC, “It was largely foreseeable, and the agency was warned.”
Minutes after Wednesday’s second and more serious accident, which sent more than a dozen passengers to hospitals with minor injuries, Richard Hunt, the MTA’s general manager overseeing Valley operations, ordered Orange Line buses to slow to 10 mph at crossings.
Officials said that because Orange Line buses are running more slowly, an end-to-end trip on the 14-mile route now takes about two minutes longer. Previously, a one-way trip on the east-west route, from Warner Center in Woodland Hills to North Hollywood, took just under 40 minutes.
Also Thursday, city and transit officials gathered for a news conference at City Hall to announce that they’re working on safety issues and to call the busway – which had 11,000 riders Wednesday – a success.
“Yes, there have been a few problems,” said Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who heads the MTA. But he blamed the accidents on the motorists involved, who authorities say had run red lights. “We’re doing all the things we need to do to be safer.”
Earlier in the day, Villaraigosa dispatched traffic officers with the L.A. Department of Transportation to key intersections along the busway.
“It’s for high visibility,” said traffic Officer Gina Tellechea, who worked the intersection at Corbin Avenue and Topham Street, where one of Wednesday’s collisions occurred.
But some said that not all Orange Line drivers were slowing down as required.
“They’re supposed to slow down, but some of them don’t,” said Officer Alex Foster, who directed traffic at Topham and Corbin. “We’re supposed to turn them in.”
Many MTA drivers say they have had “near misses” on the busway – slamming on the brakes or honking to avoid motorists who have run red lights. Some motorists complain that the busway’s intersections, which resemble rail crossings, are confusing.
Other MTA drivers say not much can be done to protect against traffic scofflaws.
“Any day there could be an accident on any line,” said James Green, an MTA driver for 3 1/2 years. “All [motorists] have to do is pay attention to the signs and signals.” He added that even with crossing gates, flashing lights and other safety additions, if motorists are “on the phone, they aren’t going to see the flashing lights. They’re not going to be paying attention.”
12:38 pm-Any longer on the postng and you’d need your own website.
It’s not an all or nothing, some accidents may be a fault of the bus driver but I’ve seen some pretty dumb moves of all kinds out on the streets.
Educating people on safety would help, but as long as our city “leaders” refuse to consider learning the English language as even mildly useful function, a lot of mistakes will continue on the roads, some costing lives. There should be some acceptable level of safety that is acceptable that is less than 100% foolproof and costs less than just putting people into taxis for that cost.
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