[Editor’s Note: South L.A. activist Damien Goodmon frequently writes on transportation issues, and he was busy following the fatal Chatsworth train crash on Friday, Sept. 12. A portion of the following essay appeared in Friday;s edition of the Daily News.]
Fiscal Year ‘08 was a “good year” for the Blue Line. It was “only” involved in 29 “reportable” accidents.
“Only” three people were killed. (By law, the train company only is required to report accidents that require transport to a medical facility. Through July, total numbers are 90 dead and more than 821 accidents.)
Despite Fiscal Year ‘08 being a “good year,” here are the comparative stats:
The accident rate for freeways in 2007: 1.09 per million miles driven.
The accident rate for the Blue Line in Fiscal Year ‘08: 17.1 per million miles operated.
The fatality rate for roads in 2007: 0.012 per million miles driven.
The fatality rate for the Blue Line in Fiscal Year ‘08: 1.77 per million miles operated.
The only thing more deadly than street-level light rail is Metrolink, which, from January 1993 through December 2007, had a fatality rate of 4.06 per million miles operated, multiple times higher than even the busiest commuter rail systems in the country in New York, Chicago, Boston and other cities.
And the Blue Line was in an accident with an empty Blue Line bus in the Washington Blvd section (identiical to the Expo Line tracks from Western to Vermont) that left 13 people injured (http://laist.com/).
As for the Chatsworth Crash…
In the rush to judgment in the tragic Chatsworth accident, the focus has been on the actions of the train engineer, a tactic that is beneficial to our transportation agencies.
As a rail safety advocate who for the past two years has been involved in an intense political and legal battle regarding rail safety of a proposed light rail line in my South L.A. community, that line of reasoning is all too familiar.
Despite the fact that Metrolink operates one of the deadliest commuter rail systems in America and MTA operates the deadliest light-rail system in America, our region’s rail transportation agencies continue to offer the lone-culprit theory for nearly every accident. This time it’s the train conductor; in the past it’s been the hundreds of deceased/injured motorists and pedestrians.
The blame-the-victim strategy distracts the public from the rail safety cost-benefit analysis that our transportation agencies continue to implement with impunity. It distracts the public from the manner in which our politicians have erroneously translated our requests for traffic relief into an unsafe commuter rail and light-rail system built on the cheap.
It may very well be true that in many rail accidents the transportation system’s user bears some responsibility. But with accident rates so much higher than their peers’, it does not logically follow that the policies and the designs of our rail transport systems are not a factor.
For the past two years, the South L.A. group, the Citizens’ Campaign to Fix the Expo Rail Line, has been on the front lines of a battle with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority about rail safety. Our goal has been to secure investment in safety enhancements on the Expo Light Rail Line, which is currently under construction.
We are concerned that the line will have the same tragic consequences as MTA’s Blue Line, which at 90 deaths and 821 accidents, is the deadliest light-rail line in the U.S.
In our legal proceeding before the California Public Utilities Commission, the state’s rail safety regulatory body, we’ve used the MTA and CPUC’s own reports, statistics, internal memos and e-mails to explain why the street-level Expo Line crossings will be deadly. World and nationally renowned authorities on transportation system failures, human error, rail accident causation and car accident causation have testified on our behalf.
Getting Brushed off
At each turn, our broad coalition and our rail safety experts have been dismissed by the politicians on the MTA and subsidiary boards citing as their reasons: The recommendations and requests are cost-prohibitive, would cause delay, or “would violate their policy.”
Blaming the victim or implying that accidents can’t be prevented takes the spotlight off inadequate policies, unsafe designs and system failures. Whether it’s implementing more active alert systems, building new tracks so freight trains don’t operate on the same track as Metrolink or adopting as a standard that light-rail trains be built elevated or underground in densely populated, congested urban spaces, our transportation agencies can be doing so much more than they are right now.
We cannot allow the Chatsworth accident report to be shelved. The investigation mustn’t be limited to just this one accident, and we cannot accept as an explanation that the engineer was only to blame. An independent system-wide, top-to-bottom critique that evaluates every policy and budget decision with the goal of creating a series of recommendations is the very least we must do to honor the memories of the victims of last week's accident and the countless many who have been killed on our region's tracks before them.
Damien Goodmon is the coordinator of the Citizens' Campaign to Fix the Expo Rail Line. Fix Expo is on the web at www.FixExpo.org
