In Daenver yesterday (1-29-05) an Ambulence responding to a call hit one of the lightrail trains. It derailed 3 cars and one of the cars went right into a camera shop. Luckly no one was killed, but there were 6 injurys. I makes you wonder how well they train the ambulwence drivers. I always thought that public service vehicles were suppossed to stop at all railroad crossings. For this kind of dmamge, the ambulence must have been going pretty fast.
Playing Devil advocate here…
How well do they train thier operators to stop the trolley and yield the ROW when they see firetruck, police car or ambie…
IMHO light rail should not run in the streets anymore due to the ever growing amount of vehicles.
I agree with Mustanggt. I don’t see any advantage of adding a rail system to help alleviate traffic problems if mixed in with exisiting traffic! Paticularly in older cties where narrow streets dominate within the city core. Accidents can happen anywhere and it’s easy to hit the broad side of a barn or lightrail vehicle in this case. What were the street conditions and other factors? If there is fault in this accident , I place it on the city planners.
This morning, the driver of the ambulance was charged with causing the collision.
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/4157650/detail.html
Denver ambulances do have pre-emption devices, but this driver chose to run the red light that did not change for him. The light protected the train in the block as it was supposed to do. There was an issue with construction activity (i.e. temporary plywood headache covered walkway barrier walls around a construction site) partially blocking the view of the intersection. RTD in Denver segregated the tracks from traffic where they could. There was very little traffic in the area on the weekend when this happened in good weather…
dtpowell - does not matter about location. In your back yard, a Cincinnati ambulance on River Road (US-50) near Sayler Park recently passed a CSX freight train and then turned in front of it only to be hit by the train. That driver is now out of a job. [V][V][V]http://www.wcpo.com/news/2005/local/01/14/train.html