Rail safety report blames careless drivers

08:44 PM CST on Thursday, March 11, 2004

From 11 News Staff Reports

Click to watch Jason Whitely's report

HOUSTON -- Houston has had more accidents involving light rail cars and automobiles in just a couple of months than other cities have in an entire year. Just Wednesday night another illegal left turn led to another accident.

Can anything be done to bring down the numbers? That's what Metro tried to find out. And Thursday the Texas Transportation Institute issued its light rail safety report.

A study of the ongoing conflict between drivers and light rail leaves no question that Houston's drivers are making mistakes. In its report the Texas Transportation Institute says, "all of the collisions appear to be due to motor vehicle driver errors. None appeared to be preventable by LRV (light rail) operators based on available video."

AIR 11 Police say the woman made an illegal left turn in front of the train.

In a little more than four months MetroRail has become a fixture downtown and on the evening news.

Houston has the worst record in the country when it comes to cars crashing into light rail trains. Wednesday night was the latest, the 24th since December. The driver of a pick-up made an illegal left turn onto the tracks and in front of the oncoming train.

While Metro looks to the new Texas Transportation Institute study for answers on how to reduce the number of accidents, drivers are just looking.

"You got signs over there, over here. Signs here, um, there is so much," says a Houston commuter.

The majority of the suggestions in the TTI report are about signs, limiting the numbers of them in the downtown core, making lighted signs more visible in the Texas Medical Center and adding other markings to lanes to show what is off limits more visibly.

Metro has had more accidents launching light rail than any other system in the country.

There have been no fatal accidents but TTI reached another conclusion. "Sooner or later it is going to happen," says Brian Bocker. "If the accident continue at the rate we have them."

"We oughta have a zero accident philosophy," says Metro Police Chief Thomas Lambert. "And that's what we need to work toward."

Something else in the report says may not come as much of a surprise to drivers on Houston streets every day" It says "field observations demonstrated that there are many motor vehicle drivers who practice aggressive driving: several instances of unsafe driving, illegal turns across tracks, running of red signals, and other infractions."

Illegal turns, Metro police say, are the main reason for most of the accidents.

But Metro's solution to this embarrassing problem may be found in a report released Thursday afternoon.

The study suggests five changes by Metro:

• It will add flashing 'train coming' signs at many intersections.

• Metro wants to stop traffic from every direction by retiming lights to have all sides be red while a train is crossing.

• You'll likely notice better lane markings showing where you can and can't turn.

• Metro wants help from Houston Police and Harris County Sheriff's Deputies to catch drivers making illegal turns.

• Metro wants to add light rail safety to drivers education courses.

Enforcement has worked for some pedestrians. Jay Dagget heard about jaywalking from friends at work who got the $220 ticket. "You see it stopped me," he says.

While the report praised Metro for what it called "genuine and strong commitment to maintain and improve safety", it also provided a list of what traffic experts said could potentially stop some of the accidents. Foremost among the recommendations were those about signs. The report says sometimes the LED signs are difficult to read at a distance. Other times the report indicates there are so many signs there may be a confusing clutter to drivers.

The report cost $81,000, but if it helps cut down on crashes along the line and improve MetroRail's image, it'll likely be considered priceless. Metro has spent more than $600,000 so far just to repair it's rail cars damaged in crashes.

Sixty-seven percent of all light rail crashes have occurred between Montrose and Pierce along the Main Street line. Twenty percent of the crashes happened in the Texas Medical Center.

Metro says ridership is more than 36-percent higher than anticipated with a weekday boardings in February totaling 245,800. That's an average of 12,290 people a day.

The number was a bit higher for Saturdays and a bit lower for Sundays. These numbers do not include riders during the Super Bowl.