LA Times On Metrolink Grade Crossing Safety

by Rafael

The LA Times has published an article on Metrolink's safety record, charting the 244 grade crossings deaths on its far-flung network over the past 15 years. On average, that works out to more than one a month.


Source: LA Times Sep 26 2009

While it is true that Metrolink has suffered safety lapses, most notoriously the case of a train engineer who was texting on a cell phone when he should have been paying attention to trackside signals at Chatsworth, it is also true that the agency has to operate on a shoestring budget. The article complains bitterly about a corporate culture that supposedly prioritizes ridership growth over grade crossing safety, comparing it to MTA. That agency is far better funded precisely because it has higher ridership. Metrolink is caught in a Catch-22.

The article also cites the example of a confused elderly lady driver who made a right turn at the Buena Vista Street intersection in Burbank. When the crossing gate came down on her car, she panicked and stepped on the accelerator. Tragically, she was killed in the ensuing train crash. Metrolink concluded it was a clear case of driver error and have made only minimal changes to the intersection in response to the fatality. Without additional public funding, there's not a whole lot it can do.

Up in the SF peninsula, Caltrain has a program for rail safety enforcement, but this public outreach effort hasn't made a significant dent in the grim statistics. It seems that in addition to suicidal persons, there will always be a small contingent of motorists who either don't know how to behave at railroad grade crossings or flout the rules.

What both commuter rail services have run up against is that the only proven way to eliminate or at least massively reduce grade crossing fatalities is full grade separation plus sturdy fences for the rail corridor.

Caltrans did promise to grade separate the aforementioned Buena Vista Street in Burbank against the single rail track in the context of a project to widen I-5, but that's just one one grade crossing among hundreds. Elsewhere in Southern California, a large number of grade crossings were eliminated or had their rail traffic sharply reduced by the Alameda Corridor project. More are either planned or under construction in the context of the Alameda Corridor East project in the San Gabriel Valley. For its part, OCTA is lobbying Congress to close a funding gap for 19 new grade separations on the BNSF Transcon line in Orange County, a critical artery for getting goods in and out of the LA and Long Beach harbors.

One of the reasons the California HSR project is so expensive is that it will feature all-new fully grade separated tracks. In the SF peninsula, part of the Central Valley and in the Lancaster-Anaheim section of the Metrolink service network, the starter line will run immediately next to existing regional and commuter as well as freight trains. While AB3034, the bill made law by the passage of prop 1A(2008) last November, does not explicitly require CHSRA to grade separate any but the HSR tracks, also including adjacent tracks for legacy services should be a high priority wherever that is technically and economically feasible and, it is not already done or planned in another context.

Voters/taxpayers should demand nothing less, even if it doing so entails exercising strictly limited and generous eminent domain against a relatively small numbers of businesses and home owners. This applies in Fullerton just as much as it does in the SF peninsula, Fresno, Bakersfield and elsewhere in the state. The benefits extend well beyond safety, e.g. to rail corridor capacity, reduced dependence on oil in the transportation sector plus the elimination of train horns and warning bells.

Making Tracks Down South

by Rafael

while CHSRA continues to face widely publicized opposition in the SF peninsula, there is active competition for the alignment that the phase 2 spur from LA Union Station to San Diego will follow. We already discussed the ROW issues in an earlier post.

The Riverside Press-Enterprise explains that the City of Riverside is competing with the much smaller City of Corona for a station, as both recognize the economic value of having a stop on the network. The Corona concept is based on an alignment alternative down I-15 and is supported by Riverside county as well as Lake Elsinore and Temecula. This would be the shortest option that still allows for a station close to Ontario airport, but the proposed station at Cajalco Rd would be several miles south-east of downtown Corona; an old freight spur could be leveraged for new Metrolink routes, but most passengers would presumably drive or take a bus to a giant parking lot in the middle of nowhere (cp. Victorville). The city could probably improve its chances by proposing instead a new station for both HSR and Metrolink at the intersection of the BNSF Transcon line and I-15, between Quarry St. and the CA-91 interchange in Corona proper.

On the other hand, CHSRA's completed and certified program-level EIR/EIS calls for trains to run further east past UC Riverside, before joining I-15 by way of I-215. Three separate connectors down from the I-10 corridor near Colton are being studied, but running above or below Iowa Ave, Chicago Ave or S Riverside Ave/Main Street is non-trivial. Note that the existing Riverside Metrolink station is located approx. 1.5 miles south of the CA-91/CA-60/I-215 interchange, rendering it useless as a regional feeder service to the HSR station for Corona, Perris and San Bernardino. This last city would very much like to have an HSR station of its own, but its downtown is out of the way of the preferred route described in the program-level EIR/EIS.

There is, of course, one heretical idea that might be worth considering now that DesertXPress looks like it may go ahead: continuing HSR along the BNSF Transcon line and/or CA-91 past the phase 1 section to Fullerton. Bullet trains would then run to San Diego via Corona without any need for additional HSR tracks along I-10. Eventually, a connector would put Riverside and San Bernardino on the spur to Victorville and Las Vegas. Anaheim ARTIC would also be on a spur, though there is a railroad ROW running north from Orange that could perhaps be used to allow a subset of trains to include that station on a run-through detour. The biggest problems are NIMBYs in the Santa Ana Valley and, the fact that this route would not run anywhere near Ontario airport. That would mean redoing part of the program-level EIR/EIS for this phase 2 spur, something I am sure CHSRA would prefer to avoid.

The above is meant to illustrate how integrated planning of the California network and DesertXPress line could open up new and possibly superior alternatives for HSR development. One slide at the recent press conference announcing the inclusion of Las Vegas in the federally designated California HSR corridor already included a connector between Palmdale and Victorville, though frankly one between Mojave and Barstow would be more useful for SF-LV and hew close to an existing road/rail traffic corridor (CA-58) The latter point is relevant for CEQA. For the moment, though, all of this remains wishful thinking: there appears to have been zero formal contact between CHSRA and DesertXPress to date and, neither planning body has taken ownership of getting any such connector funded and built.