Blue Line Plan Will Allocate $5 Million for Safety Features : Metro Rail: Fatal accidents spur action by transportation officials. Some measures will be implemented immediately although funding is pending.

Transit officials, in an effort to stem a rash of fatal collisions and other accidents along the Metro Rail Blue Line, agreed Monday to spend $5.1 million on additional safety features.

New measures will include lowering the wire mesh fences at crossings from six feet to three feet, so trains can be better seen by pedestrians and motorists, and installing lights on crossing gates so train operators can tell if they are down.

Also, transit agencies will work with law enforcement groups to make rail safety classes mandatory for people caught violating safety rules.

Some of the actions--such as those mentioned above--will be taken immediately, without approval of the money to pay for them, officials said. Others--such as a plan to install four, instead of two, barrier gates at selected crossings--will be part of a long-term program to test their effectiveness.

There is no money in the Blue Line budget to pay for the extra expenditure. Nick Patsaouras, president of the Southern California Rapid Transit District, the Blue Line’s operator, said he expects the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission to allocate the funds from its overall rail budget at its Nov. 28 meeting.

Patsaouras appeared at a press conference Monday with other transit officials after the directors of the Rail Construction Corp., a subsidiary of the transportation commission, approved the additional safety measures in a 7-1 vote. He said that the Blue Line is “very safe” as it is, but that pedestrians and motorists along the 22-mile route were having difficulty getting used to the trains, which travel up to 55 m.p.h. through densely populated neighborhoods.

There have been four fatalities along the Long Beach to Los Angeles route since operations began in August. The most recent occurred Wednesday in Los Angeles when a man apparently ran onto the tracks at Vernon and Long Beach avenues and into the path of an oncoming train. Two weeks earlier, just south of that location, a woman and her 4-year-old son were killed when she drove her car around a lowered crossing gate into the path of a train.

Ed McSpedon, president of Rail Construction Corp., said all fatalities and other incidents involving the trains resulted from pedestrians and motorists ignoring signs and warning devices, or trying to race across the tracks in front of trains. Another problem, he said, is motorists making left turns across tracks without seeing the trains.

Most of the measures approved by Rail Construction Corp., he said, are intended to improve the effectiveness of warning devices and “find a way to drive the message home harder” that people must exercise caution near the tracks.

The other measures that are to be implemented immediately, at an estimated cost of $2.8 million, are the installation of bilingual warning signs at street-level crossings and the intensification of a program to educate the public about how the trains work.

McSpedon said sheriff’s deputies will stop warning those who violate safety rules and issue citations.