Phoenix is building a downtown light rail line and is looking to Houston on, ahem, how NOT to do things:
When light-rail trains roll through busy Valley streets, transit officials hope they run more like those in Salt Lake City than Houston.
In Houston, a catalog of 62 collisions over two years, causing 110 injuries and a death, led critics to call the train the “Wham Bam Tram.”
In Salt Lake City, which, like Houston, has seven miles of in-street track, crashes totaled eight in the same period. Four a year is the national average.
[snip]
The Federal Transit Administration tapped the state Department of Transportation to oversee safety plans. That double-check was absent in Houston because of a legal loophole, since closed, for systems paid entirely from local funds. Houston rushed to open service in time for the 2004 Super Bowl.
Light-rail critics say officials tend to downplay the dangers of the systems.“It’s fundamentally programmed for failure because you have people and cars and light-rail trains competing on the same level in the street,” said Becky Fenger of Phoenix, who opposed past light-rail propositions. “It will be a bumper-car derby out there.”
It certainly has been in Houston! Our own Tom Bazan was quoted in the story:
Tom Bazan of Houston, who has tracked light-rail crashes, said accident data cannot be trusted because it is reported by transit agencies. He accuses operators of reporting low numbers and concealing crash facts, citing missing footage from on-board cameras.
Transit officials say Bazan and his supporters inflate the significance of minor accidents. The FTA tracks only crashes involving injuries or more than $7,500 in damage.
A log of Houston crashes shows three-fourths of them involved automobile drivers making left turns in front of trains or running red lights from side streets. In almost every case, accident investigators blamed drivers. Pedestrian collisions accounted for most of the remaining accidents. FTA officials say the pattern is repeated around the country.
Ah yes. The obligatory blame-the-drivers excuse. I’m curious for whom those accident investigators work. Metro perhaps?
Alongside the story is an artist’s rendition of a Phoenix light rail car which makes it look like that city’s trains will have a cattle guard-type thing attached to the front!
