Santa Monica Dispatch » Blog Archive » Group Claims Expo Rail Line Is ‘Deadly’
Group Claims Expo Rail Line Is ‘Deadly’
By: Peggy Clifford
Published: October 4th, 2009
The following statement was issued Friday by Citizens’ Campaign to Fix the Expo Rail Line.
MTA board members are claiming that in comparison to their Metrolink peers their rail safety policies are worthy of praise. Not true says a prominent Southern California rail safety advocacy group.
“Comparing the rail safety of Metrolink to MTA is like comparing Ted Bundy to John Wayne Gacy,” said Damien Goodmon, coordinator of the MTA watchdog group Citizens’ Campaign to Fix the Expo Rail Line (”Fix Expo Campaign”). “Metrolink is among the nation’s deadliest commuter rail systems, and MTA is the nation’s deadliest light rail system. They are different sides of the same coin and share the same failed rail safety culture that has led to scores of preventable deaths on Southland tracks.”
The Federal Transit Administration’s 2007 light rail safety statistics indicate that the national average for light rail accidents is 7.2 per million train miles traveled. Yet the same year, the MTA’s Los Angeles-to-Long Beach Blue Line, the nation’s deadliest at 94 deaths and over 836 accidents, averaged 19.9 accidents per million train miles traveled – over 275% higher than the national average. The fatality rate of the MTA light rail line, in which 225-ton trains travel up to 35 and 55 mph, is far more daunting. There have been some years in the past few when nearly half of all light rail deaths in the country were on MTA’s tracks, which are under the regulation of the California Public Utilities Commission.
Goodmon continued, “MTA claims Blue Line accidents have gone down since the ’90s, but the reality is they went down across the board, because earlier this decade the FTA changed the reporting standards for light rail accidents. It may be good public relations strategy for MTA to spin this as ‘improvement,’ but human beings are still being killed at the same high rate, and service is still being disrupted.”
MTA’s quarterly report indicates that the Blue Line killed 61 people in its first 12 years of operation, from 1990 to 2002. In the six years from 2002 to 2008, 30 more people were fatally wounded. “They’re killing people at the same rate today as they were in the beginning,” said Clint Simmons, the Public Safety Committee Chair of the West Adams Neighborhood Council, where the controversial Dorsey High School crossing on the under construction Downtown-to-Culver City Expo Line Phase 1 is located.
Statistics by the American Public Transportation Association indicate that in 2002 when the Blue Line led the nation with 61 deaths. Comparatively, the second deadliest light rail system in that span of time, which had more riders and more track miles, fatally wounded 22.
“We called the Blue Line ‘Death Row,’” said former MTA light rail operator Lester Hollins. At a community forum held at Dorsey H.S., Hollins told the crowd his MTA superiors reprimanded him for stopping his Blue Line train to pick up a toddler who had wandered on the tracks through a hole in the fence.
For the past two years, the Fix Expo Campaign, which collaborates with internationally renowned and respected experts in rail safety and vehicular accident causation, has submitted numerous public records requests for MTA to produce their accident reports. “They’ve stonewalled,” said Goodmon. “MTA just gives the number of accidents and deaths the FTA requires they report, not specifics about potential cause, age of victims or anything substantive about each individual incident. This is in stark contrast to Metrolink, where every accident is put on the Federal Railroad Administration’s safety website and the public can view the age of victims, preliminary determined cause, location, time, etc.,” said Goodmon.
“MTA claims they can’t give us the info because of potential lawsuits,” said Simmons. “That says a lot about how bad MTA’s system is if they’ve got to hide records from the public. And by the way how can it be litigiously okay for Metrolink to make the data available on the web, but not MTA?”
Goodmon continued: “MTA knows our intent is to illustrate for the world that they are making the same mistakes today on the Expo Line in South LA as they were when they designed the Blue Line: putting tracks down in the middle of highly congested areas without ‘grade separation.’” Grade separation involves the train entering a trench or going over the street on a bridge.
MTA’s statistics indicate that the most accident-prone portions of the Blue Line are where the 225-ton train operates with no gates. “92% of all vehicular accidents and 76% of total accidents occur at crossings with no gates,” said Goodmon. “Yet, 40 of the 45 street-level crossings on the under construction Expo Line Phase 1, have no crossing gates including Crenshaw, Vermont, Western and Normandie, and only one street-level crossing has them on the under construction 6 mile Eastside Extension.” MTA’s own study predicts the Expo Line will be involved in 52 accidents per year.
“They’re repeating the same mistakes, so obviously the number of light rail accidents is going to go up,” said Hollins. “You or someone you know will experience tragedy because of the MTA’s new street-level tracks.”
“They’ll be spared in Culver City, where the city demanded and MTA provided the money to build the train there without a single street-level crossing,” said Carol Tucker of the Baldwin Neighborhood Homeowners Association.
In a hearing before the California Public Utilities Commission, Russ Quimby, the former national chairman of all rail accident investigations for the National Transportation Safety Board, testified regarding planned Expo Line street-level crossings, “If the crossings at Farmdale (near Dorsey High School) and Western (near Foshay Middle School) don’t qualify for a grade separation from a safety perspective, then no crossing would.” Yet MTA has decided not to put the train underground or elevated at Western, and though directed by the CPUC to grade separate, is reapplying to run the train at street level at Dorsey HS.
“The first issue is why hasn’t MTA gone back and put the deadliest light rail train in the country in a trench like the Alameda corridor or in the air like the Green Line in El Segundo so they can stop killing people,” said Goodmon. “The second issue is how are they getting away with repeating this unsafe design on new lines in South LA and on the Eastside? These are the primary reasons we’ve called for a Congressional investigation into MTA’s planning practices and policies.”
Tucker continued: “One has to wonder if the deadliest light rail line in the country was rolling through Hancock Park, Miracle Mile, Beverly Hills and Century City, whether MTA would get away with calling their system ’safe,’ let alone spending money on new projects. But because these accidents are occurring in Watts and Compton instead of West Hollywood and Culver City there is no outcry – they have no shame.”
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* The Citizens’ Campaign to Fix the Expo Rail Line (Fix Expo Campaign) is a collaboration between over a dozen South LA community groups, neighborhood councils and homeowners association, civil rights leaders and rail safety advocates. As part of their request that MTA build train underpasses or train overpasses on the currently proposed street-level Expo Line, the group has highlighted the criticism by several rail safety experts, transportation safety experts, and former MTA rail operators, including but not limited to: Prof. Meshkati; Russ Quimby, the former National Transportation Safety Board Chairman of All-Railroad Accident Investigations; Ed Ruszak, national expert in vehicle accident causation; along with former MTA Blue Line operators.
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