Read this article in yesterday’s tribune about a railroad crossing being worked on. To read go to http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/commute/ct-met-getting-around-0809-20100808,0,3285678.column and let me know what you think.
You know - this stuff actually really makes me angry - alright grade separation to ease traffic congestion, yes I can see and support that. But the fact is, what in the world makes people think it’s ok to stop on RR tracks? The signals are there and the signals work - there are signs that say do not stop on tracks - the problem isn’t the system the problem is the fact that people ignore these signals. When I was a kid, my parents taught me that before crossing RR tracks to always look left and right, and to make sure a train wasn’t coming. Just doing that is the single biggest safety item on the RR! Now contrast it to that idiot NIMBY that the latest issue of Trains had… “What if my kid were walking on the RR tracks with his iPod and he got hit by a train?” WHAT IF YOU TAUGHT YOUR KID NOT TO WALK ON RR TRACKS WITH EARPHONES ON??? A good part of me says that when these people get hit, let Darwin take over. The only issue then is the knee-jerk reaction in the community against the RR (another great example - I used to live in Daytona Beach, where you can drive you car on the beach. Every so often, someone would get hit and killed, and props to the politicians there time and time again for NOT giving into the knee jerk reaction each time to ban driving on the beach!). Face it, ever since carts pulled by donkeys came out, people have been getting hit by transportation, and most of the time it’s their own damn fault. If people only stopped and looked both ways, made sure that they can clear the crossing before they pull into it (which dare I say is common sense to me), grade crossing fatalities would be a non-issue.
Looking at they layout on Goggle Earth, I see a traffic engineer’s big headache. Any time you have an intersection near a grade crossing, you have a lot of potential for problems.
The picture on the Trib’s site appears to be taken looking south on Nagel St., and it shows a relatively smart solution to one problem, which is putting the stop line north of the tracks. I can’t see whether there is one, but there should also be a “No Right Turn on Red” sign, though it could be above the “Don’t Stop on Tracks” sign. At least coming from the north, they have probably alleviated some of the tendency to stop on the tracks, assuming the signals are properly coordinated.
From the south, things get a little more problematic because of the five-point intersection of Nagel, Somerset and Avondale. What’s probably happening is that traffic coming across the tracks from the south bunches before drivers realize that they won’t make it across the tracks. Unfortunately, perhaps the majority of drivers do not have the requisite amount of paranoia to keep from getting into that situation. It is exceedingly difficult to coordinate the two Nagel signals in each side of the tracks to eliminate this problem. If it weren’t, we probably wouldn’t have seen that article in the first place.
We have a couple of four-track crossings at grade in San Diego that present similar problems, but in general, the signals are well enough coordinated that we don’t seem to have much of a collision problem there, though we are only talking about Amtrak, Coaster and light rail at those crossings (about