Perils of at-grade (freight) rail/vehicular traffic interaction
Christof Spieler of the transit advocacy group Citizens' Transportation Coalition posts an interesting 1953 report on Houston's problems with at-grade rail lines, and continues with a discussion about the surprising salience of the report's observations and recommendations to Houston's ongoing policymaking with regard to freight rail operations. Here's Spieler's conclusion:
What’s ahead is a process of prioritizing. TxDOT’s Houston Freight Rail Study has proposed hundreds of individual projects: grade separations, street closings, added track, relocated yards. We do not have the money to do all of them; the hardest task will be to figure out which to do first. Equally important is doing them right; some of the projects in the Study make sense, but others could damage neighborhoods rather than help them. And all this needs to happen in coordination with other agencies: TxDOT’s highway plans, METRO’s light rail and BRT lines, and the county’s commuter rail proposals.
We’ll only get good results here if the public is involved. It’s absolutely critical that the District keep the public informed and seek neighborhood input on overall goals and on specific projects. And it’s important that neighborhoods that are living with freight rail lines pay attention.
The good news is that this could be a win-win. It’s possible to design projects that will make neighborhoods quieter, safer, and easier to get around in, reduce traffic jams at railroad crossings, and take trucks off the roads by reducing railroad congestion.
The excerpt I've bolded is the only reference to METRO's light-rail operation in the entire post, which otherwise focuses on freight rail.
METRO, of course, is planning a massive expansion of at-grade rail lines in the near future. If the Main Street Danger Train line is any indicator -- and it would seem to be a better empirical indicator than editorializing from pro-METRO blogs and newspapers -- then the further expansion of at-grade rail lines along busy vehicular traffic corridors is likely to result in an increase in the number of dangerous rail/traffic intersections and associated vehicular traffic congestion.
Those two problems of at-grade-rail/traffic interaction figure prominently in the 1953 report cited by Spieler, so it's interesting that he focuses exclusively on the impact of freight rail (and not passenger rail). It's not really surprising, though, since CTC has long championed running light rail down busy Richmond (even as it told gullible local journalists that it merely wanted all options studied, and didn't prefer any alignment, something we now know was untrue). Running at-grade rail down Richmond will contribute to vehicular gridlock along Richmond and will create more dangerous intersections along the street, so we're not entirely surprised that Spieler restricted this discussion to freight rail lines, even though the same logic should apply to the Richmond light-rail alignment his group has long favored.
Transit policy formation in Houston often has its whimsical side, even from organizations that construct really nice graphics.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 08/25/07 01:15 PM | Print |
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