Attention Focuses on Hazardous Crossings

As crews worked to clean up after Wednesday’s deadly commuter train crash, attention turned to the public’s easy and potentially dangerous access to rail lines that cross city streets.

Juan Manuel Alvarez was apparently able to drive from a crossing at Chevy Chase Drive onto the rails and into the path of a Metrolink train because the street intersected the rail lines. That intersection is one of 11,000 such crossings in California and 250,000 nationwide.

Street-level crossings are known to be hazardous -- to motorists who race around the gates to avoid long waits, to pedestrians dashing across the tracks and to those bent on suicide.

But the danger is unlikely to be eliminated soon. The most effective way of keeping cars and people away from trains -- building underpasses and overpasses at locations where roads and rails intersect -- would cost billions in Los Angeles County alone.

Some 30 street-level crossings along Metrolink rails have been eliminated over the last 13 years, reducing the total number to 433, according to David Solow, the system’s chief executive. But estimates for eliminating the remaining crossings range from $5 billion to several times that amount, depending on whether streets are closed off or are modified with bridges or underpasses to keep them accessible.

This week, local officials, including Glendale Mayor Bob Yousefian, Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn and Solow called for more federal funding to eliminate some of the most dangerous intersections where trains and cars cross paths.

“We need to reduce the conflicts between vehicles and trains,” said Yousefian, whose city sits along one of Metrolink’s most heavily trafficked and dangerous corridors. “We need to start eliminating the accident possibilities.”

The corridor through Glendale and Burbank has had the most crossing accidents in the 388-mile Metrolink system. And California overall has one of the worst records in the nation for safety at rail crossings, with 577 collisions at such intersections over the last five years. The state’s dismal history prompted federal auditors last summer to urge California, along with four other states, to develop detailed plans for eliminating or improving such intersections.

According to the Federal Railroad Administration, crossings at Coldwater Canyon Avenue in Los Angeles and McFadden Street in Orange County are the most likely to have accidents in the future, based on analysis of data about the crossings gathered between 1998 and 2002.

The Chevy Chase crossing, where Alvarez entered before driving his car down the right of way and onto the tracks, ranked 143 out of 330 Metrolink crossings in the federal database.

Solow urged Congress, which has delayed for two years a bill to reauthorize transportation spending under the Bush administration, to increase funds for such projects. Solow was joined by other transit leaders, including Phil Pagano, executive director of Metra, Chicago’s commuter rail system, which is by some measures the nation’s largest.

On Wednesday, Hahn said that getting rid of crossings should be a priority; he also called for more money to build grade separations.

“It is the ultimate safety solution,” said John Blair, assistant rail safety program administrator for the Illinois Commerce Commission, which regulates rail travel in that state. “It’s just not practical because it’s cost-prohibitive.”

California has identified 58 crossings, two-thirds of them in Southern California, that regulators agree are the highest priority for getting bridges or underpasses. It would cost between $1.2 billion and $2.4 billion to construct all of the projects on the priority list, experts said.

But the federal government, which provides most of the funding for such work, has allocated just $6.8 million for improvements to rail crossings in California this year.

Other funds are available, but they are difficult to obtain. Cities and counties are responsible for planning the projects and paying for them, but they must apply to state and federal agencies for funding.

And even if every priority crossing targeted by the state were eliminated, many problem intersections would remain. The Metrolink crossing with the highest number of train-auto crashes -- at Buena Vista Street in Burbank -- isn’t even on the state’s priority list.

Six accidents have occurred at the Buena Vista Street intersection in Burbank since 1992, including a fiery January 2003 collision between a Metrolink train and a stake-bed truck that drove into its path, Metrolink records show.

The crash derailed the train, killing the truck’s driver and a train passenger and injuring more than 30 other riders.

Local officials hope to build an underpass, but they say getting funding has proved daunting. In Placentia, an ambitious $450-million project to separate 11 city streets from one of the busiest rail corridors in the region has been frustrated by uncertainty and delay in securing state and federal funding. The city, which has a total annual budget of $26 million, has gone more than $30 million into debt and auctioned parkland to keep the project going.

Irvine, which in the 1960s could, as a new city, build overpasses as part of the original infrastructure, had long planned to eliminate its four at-grade crossings.

But 30 years into the project, three street-level intersections remain, and city planners say they are frustrated by the slow pace.

“There are many hurdles to jump through,” said Dave Mori, a project manager for Irvine.

Over the last 10 years, as population growth has pushed houses, schools and businesses closer to rail lines, concern about safety at crossings has grown nationwide.

Under the direction of the Federal Railroad Administration, rail operators have worked together with municipalities, state governments and federal agencies to eliminate 41,000 of the quarter of a million crossings nationwide during the last 10 years, according to a 2004 audit by the federal inspector general’s office. Over the same period, the accident rate has gone down dramatically, the audit found.

In a number of cases, states and municipalities cobbled together the money to put trains below street level in trenches or to build bridges over the tracks for cars.

Locally, planners worked for 20 years to design, build and fund the $2.5-billion Alameda Corridor, which eliminated 200 of these crossings by putting 10 rail lines in a single trench from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to a rail yard near downtown Los Angeles.

More typically, crossings are eliminated without trenching. Most of the crossings eliminated nationwide were simply shut down: Roads leading to the tracks were blocked off, and access was eliminated. Local planners improved other intersections, with the help of federal and state money, by adding new gates and better alarm systems to warn people when trains were coming.

That, federal auditors said in their report last June, was the easy part. Most of the remaining crossings cannot easily be closed, because local residents and others need access to the streets that go over the tracks, and that means more expensive fixes.

Rail experts caution that even if all of the crossings were eliminated -- an undertaking that nearly all believe would be impractical -- people bent on suicide would still be able to get to the tracks.

Caltrain, a 77-mile commuter rail line that runs from Gilroy to San Francisco, has built bridges or underpasses at 12 intersections since 1990 -- at a cost of $20 million to $40 million apiece.

There have been no fatalities at those locations since the work was done, said Caltrain spokesperson Jayme Kunz.

But removing the crossings has not eliminated suicides: People intent on killing themselves simply go to another section of track, Kunz said.

Other authorities argue that without street level crossings, it would be far more difficult for someone like Alvarez to gain access to the tracks with a car.

Although he might have still been able to run in front of the train as a pedestrian, it would have been much more difficult for him to put his car there. It was the impact with the car that derailed the train, leading to 11 deaths and 180 injuries.

Reducing the number of street level intersections between rails and roads would make it harder for anyone -- a confused motorist or a person intent on suicide -- to find an easy place to drive across the tracks, said Rick Richmond, chief executive of the Alameda Corridor East project, a $950-million plan to eliminate 20 street-level intersections in the San Gabriel Valley.

“If every crossing were separated,” Richmond said, “this kind of thing would be far less likely.”

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Separation costs

Using grade separations to keep cars and trains apart is an expensive, complicated process. Costs vary with conditions and requirements. Here’s what one such project, to begin in March in El Monte, will cost:

*--* Project elements Costs in millions Design $3.0 Right-of-way $5.4 Utility relocations $1.7 Construction $26.4 Construction management $3.4 Project management $1.8 Total costs $41.7

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Source: Alameda Corridor-East Construction Authority.

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Times staff writers Dan Weikel and Elizabeth Shogren and researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this report.