Blue Line safety sting leads to nearly 300 citations

In a sting aimed at curbing accidents along the Blue Line, police and sheriff’s deputies staked out a two-mile stretch of the line’s tracks in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday and ticketed nearly 300 jaywalkers and drivers they caught using cellphones and making illegal left turns.

Transportation officials said the crackdown was the latest effort in a push to improve safety along the Blue Line, the city’s oldest and most popular light rail line but also its most dangerous.

Ninety-nine people have died in accidents and suicides involving the line in the nearly 20 years since the service from Los Angeles to Long Beach began.

Marc Littman, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said the death rate is lower than for highway accidents. “But any fatality is one too many,” he said. “Our goal is no more fatalities and no more accidents.”

Critics contend that the traffic enforcement stings are public relations ploys that do little to address the larger safety issues they say plague the line.

“The system is not reliable,” said Damien Goodmon, a rail safety advocate, “and when you have an unreliable system, it results in accidents.”

Over the last two decades, the MTA has made several safety improvements to the Blue Line, which crosses more than 100 intersections in some of Southern California’s most densely populated communities.

The changes include the installation of LED signs to deter motorists from making illegal turns in front of trains, the installation of four-quadrant crossing gates and pedestrian gates at several intersections, and lower fences along the tracks so train operators have a better view of traffic.

The changes have worked to reduce accident rates, Littman said. In the last five years there were 1.09 accidents per 100,000 train miles, compared with 4.09 in the first five years the trains operated, according to MTA data.

But pedestrian deaths and suicides have not declined.

Data show there were 39 such fatalities in the last 10 years, six more than the 33 recorded in the previous decade.

“MTA wants to be commended for not being as dangerous as they were,” Goodmon said.

He advocates retrofitting the line so that instead of going through intersections, the trains would travel on bridges above or in trenches or tunnels below them.

Littman said that such a plan is untenable because of what it would cost and that the current strategy is working.

Along with traffic stings like Wednesday’s, the MTA operates enforcement cameras along the Blue Line corridor, he said. The cameras resulted in almost 50,000 citations between 1995 and 2009, he said.

The onus for train safety, Littman said, ultimately lies on the people.

“We will continue to do our part, but there’s only so much we can do,” Littman said “We’re appealing to the public. You’ve got to pay attention too.”

kate.linthicum@latimes.com