MOTORISTS SEEM TO FORGET THEY ARE NOW SHARING THE ROAD WITH A NEW LIGHT-RAIL SYSTEM, AND CRASHES ABOUND, WRITES HOWARD WITT.
This sprawling city of big oil, big cars and big roads has a nifty new downtown light-rail system sporting sleek train cars, convenient stops and rapid service. But for all their careful designs, the transportation planners forgot to do one thing: allow for Houston’s terrible drivers.
There have been nearly 60 accidents in the first eight months of the system’s operation, most caused when drivers plowed into the trains, which share the street along much of the rail line’s 7.5-mile route. Although the number of collisions has declined over the summer, there is still one crash every five days or so. That means the Houston system has an accident rate 20 times the average for light-rail systems across the country, according to national transportation statistics.
“Red lights don’t seem to mean the same thing here as they mean in other places,” said Frank Wilson, president and chief executive of the Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority, a newcomer who arrived from Los Angeles four months ago. “I don’t say that gives us a sense of vindication. It’s more a depressing finding.
“But even if it is the [fault of the] other guy,” he added, “it happens to be our trains that keep running into them. So how do we harden ourselves against the accidents?”
Unfortunately, armor plating was not one of the options available from the trains’ German manufacturer.
Instead, transit officials have opted for more conventional solutions, such as increased warning signs along the light-rail route and four-way red lights to halt all vehicular traffic at intersections when a train is approaching. Also, train drivers have been told to blow their horns a lot.
Joseph Kittrell, a Houston hairdresser, wishes some of those extra measures had been in place in December. That was when he made an illegal left turn and was struck by one of the trains making a test run before the official opening of the rail line on Jan. 1. He was knocked unconscious and suffered several broken ribs. His truck was totaled.
“I saw two green lights directly ahead of me on the corner there, and in my mind two green lights meant you can go, so I turned, which was the wrong way, but I couldn’t see the sign,” Kittrell recounted. “A month after I could move again, I drove the same route and I could see they changed the signs to make everything more visible.”
Kittrell said the accident cost him $30,000 in medical bills, increased insurance premiums and the replacement of his truck.
“I will always feel it was the city’s fault because they didn’t plan it well enough,” he added. “I stay clear of the Metro now.”
Staying clear, actually, is what transit officials are hoping for. The trains connect Houston’s downtown core with the new Reliant Stadium football complex to the south, running for most of their route along Main Street, a principal shopping thoroughfare akin to State Street in Chicago, and Fannin Street, a major north-south artery.
To keep costs down, transportation planners shied from building a subway or an elevated system; to keep public opposition down, they opted not to close the streets to traffic. But those choices meant the trains had to share space with cars. Transit officials hope drivers will gradually cede the route to the trains and choose alternate, parallel streets.
Until that happens, however, drivers who cling to Main and Fannin Streets face narrow lanes with trains running alongside them just a few feet away, left turn lanes right on top of the tracks and a confusing array of signs and warning lights that can take many moments for unfamiliar drivers to comprehend.
The problem is especially acute in Houston’s Medical Center district, an area with dozens of hospitals and medical buildings where left-turning cars have only a few seconds to execute their turns without being struck.
“Down there [in the Medical Center area] it is one of the scariest places because you’re allowed to get your car in front of the trolley to make a left turn,” Wilson acknowledged.
It scarcely helped matters that the city’s traffic accident rate was 2.5 times the national average before the light-rail system began operations –and in the Medical Center area, the rate was four times worse. But Wilson is optimistic that things will settle down.
“If you look at cities where the trolley service or light-rail service came first, you don’t see this kind of behavior,” he said. “I ran the system in Philadelphia. We had trolleys all over the city, in the street, mixed traffic, and nowhere near the kind of accident rate. … Here, light rail has got to fit in, and it’s a foreign object. So there is this evolution.”
The evolution is indeed beginning. Wary at first of surrendering their beloved cars, the residents of the nation’s fourth-largest city are gradually embracing the novel idea that rapid transit can spare them from at least some of Houston’s horrendous traffic jams. Daily ridership has steadily grown from 12,000 in the spring to more than 30,000 in August, Wilson said. Plans call for an additional 72 miles of tracks by 2012 if federal matching funds can be obtained.
What’s more, the light-rail line has helped spark a renaissance in the heart of downtown, where new restaurants, clubs and loft apartments are giving people a reason not to flee the city after 5 p.m.
“Houston is the most spread-out, least-dense city in America, and the result is that everything looks like a strip mall,” said Stephen Klineberg, a sociology professor at Rice University and expert on Houston trends. “You can see that this light rail has really captured the imagination and, for the first time in 50 years, created a stimulus for downtown development.”
