From: "Friends of Transit" To: Subject: Big story on light rail safety in the Arizona Republic Date: Tuesday, July 06, 2004 2:19 PM Friends, Below is a copy of an article from this weekend that appeared in the Arizona Republic regarding light rail safety. You will note that even though the system won't open until 2008, great care and foresight is going into the planning of this system to ensure the highest level of safety for both the passengers and the traveling public. The article mentions that in Houston, they have experienced a significant number of train/car accidents. It also mentions that in Salt Lake City, there have been much fewer incidents. The officials at Valley Metro Rail are looking to learn what works well in Salt Lake City and to learn from the challenges of Houston. This foresight in planning should help to minimize the number of incedents in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. Kudos to the officials at Valley Metro Rail for addressing this problem up front. However, as you know, the transit opponents will look to the Houston challenges and try to distort those figures and put fear into our local public and disregard the positive experiences in Salt Lake City. It would be helpful if our friends would also send Letters to the Editor praising Valley Metro Rail for aggressively working to address this issue. David Schwartz Executive Director Keeping light rail off collision course Tom Tingle/ The Arizona Republic Cars travel along Central Ave., north of McDowell. Skyscrapers now tower over the old palm trees, which will be removed to make way for light rail. Valley's system won't open until 2008, but the work to limit related crashes, congestion is already well under way Bob Golfen The Arizona Republic Jul. 4, 2004 12:00 AM Valley light-rail officials are hoping to avoid what is happening in Houston. The Texas city launched its first light-rail segment in January, and already there have been 44 auto-train collisions. Investigators say the crashes were caused not by the trains but rather by motorists unfamiliar with their presence on city streets. The vast majority of the crashes were the result of motorists making illegal left turns across the tracks. "Basically, the car cuts in front of the train," said Lloyd Smith, director of traffic management for Houston's Metro Transit Authority. "There's only so much traffic engineering we can do." Valley Metro Rail designers and engineers are trying to cover all the bases as they prepare to run 100,000-pound railroad cars down the center of major Valley streets, said John Farry, spokesman for Valley Metro Rail. "We certainly don't want there to be any collisions with a train," Farry said. The start of construction may be two years away, with the opening set for December 2008, but the massively complex job of coordinating how trains and traffic will share urban streets is well under way. The centerpiece of the light-rail operation will be a computerized system, called Predictive Priority, that will control traffic lights, continuously timing and adjusting the lights at intersections to allow the train to pass without impeding motorists. The goal is to have trains flow through city traffic without creating additional congestion or adversely affecting adjacent businesses and, most of all, without causing crashes. But the left-turn issue looms large. While there will be plenty of adjustments required of drivers, perhaps the biggest adjustment will be the strict limits on left turns. To reach businesses or side streets on the other side of the tracks, drivers will be required to make U-turns at signaled intersections, each of which will have dedicated left-turn arrows. A curb will block cars and trucks from crossing the track bed except at the intersections, and, for safety reasons, drivers will be allowed to make left turns only at intersections with a traffic light. "People will make left turns at controlled intersections ... rather than the permissive left turns that exist today," Farry said. A public-safety campaign will be launched by Phoenix before the opening of the light-rail system, he added. There will be 148 traffic lights at intersections along the light-rail route, 38 more than there are now, and on most parts of the route, the signals will be every quarter-mile or half-mile. Businesspeople and property owners along the right of way of the 20-mile rail line are worried that the left-turn limitations will hurt their business. "We were shocked when we learned that the city would not permit left-hand turns across the tracks," said real estate agent Dan Abrams, chairman of the Camelback Road Coalition. "This is a bigger issue than people really know." Abrams and his group are pushing to have the city add "left-turn pockets" at various points between the intersections to allow additional left turns for business ac- cess. The Predictive Priority system will use sensors in the tracks to monitor the movement of each train and predict when it will reach subsequent intersections, delaying or advancing the signals' changes. That way, the trains will be able to roll along with fewer interruptions from traffic lights while not disturbing the coordination of the lights for street traffic, said Patrick Fuller, Valley Metro's traffic-signal design manager. "What we're trying to do with Predictive Priority is even out the train movement with the vehicle movement," Fuller said. "We're not giving 100 percent priority to the train." Larry Head, an engineering research professor at University of Arizona who serves as a consultant for the Valley's rail-system design, said the planners decided against a pre-emptive system that would have given the train absolute priority. "That completely disrupts the coordination of signals," Head said. "It's just bad and inefficient." The Valley Metro designers have worked closely with officials in Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa, Fuller said, to make sure the Predictive Priority system is compatible with city traffic. "We've been included since the beginning," said Tomas Godbee, traffic engineering supervisor for the Phoenix Street Transportation Department. "We're very comfortable that this is a system that will work well." Houston also uses Predictive Priority and all-controlled left turns, Head noted, but in that city, confused or impatient drivers have thwarted the safety measures. Light-rail engineers in Houston have reconfigured some of the traffic lights and added more warning signs, said Ken Connaughton, a spokesman for the Metro Transit Authority in Houston. But still, there are people who don't seem to get it. "We're enhancing the system anywhere we can with signage, road markings, anything we can do to help the situation," Connaughton said. "What we have is a learning-curve situation where people are not used to it (light rail)." Unlike in Houston, there have been few crashes involving the Salt Lake City rail system, which opened in 1999, said Carole Berschoor, a spokeswoman for the Utah Transit Authority. As Valley Metro is planning to do, Utah Transit allows left turns only at signaled intersections and uses Predictive Priority. Berschoor attributes the low crash rate to a local culture in which "people follow the rules."