Blame The Drivers? No, Blame The Politicians
The Comical's Lucas Wall notes the following in a story today:
Vehicles collided frequently along the Main Street corridor long before the MetroRail line was built, Texas Transportation Institute data show.Lambert, of course, never misses an opportunity to berate Houston's drivers rather than concede there might be problems with the light rail situation.Between 1998 and 2000, nearly 8,000 crashes were recorded along the 7 1/2-mile corridor where Metropolitan Transit Authority light rail trains now travel. Almost 2,000 were on Main and Fannin alone, two streets that make up most of today's rail route.
The pre-rail crash total averaged about 51 incidents per week, or roughly 7 1/2 per day.
Vehicles have collided with trains 35 times since the rail line was completed six months ago, a little more than one collision per week.
"The reality is, the driving public was experiencing these serious collisions before we ever put a different mode of transportation there," said Metro Police Chief Tom Lambert.
Wall, a writer who has taken the opportunity to editorialize in his news columns in the past, passes up the opportunity to point out that the decision to place the light rail along this already dangerous traffic corridor and then not to segregate it properly was a political decision that may not have weighed safety factors heavily enough.
That's the point I made recently in the comments section here, and that a reader makes in the comments section here.
Laurence brings additional wisdom to this topic.
In a related article, Lucas Wall announces:
He and other experts cite four primary reasons drivers are more likely to get into a wreck here:Wall then lists the following, and develops paragraphs around them: Sprawl, Less Investment, Less Enforcement, Motorcyle Officers, Poor Driver Education.
The astute reader will note that, in addition to being clumsy headings stylistically and substantively, there are five of them, not the announced four.
Does anybody edit that rag?
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 04/18/04 15:42 | Danger Train | Technorati
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Comments
Another obvious question. If there are such detailed records on counting these vehiclular incidents, why can't Metro release the precise figures on ridership? I bet they are burning a hole on somebody's hard drive over in the Absence of Reason on Louisiana St.
There must be demographics like breakdowns by age and race on this choo-choo ridership list. After all, we are proud to live in a world-class city where we can tell exactly how many people of each race get pulled over by the cops each year!
We ought to be able to know to the homeless person, an exact count of who rides the choo-choo, what race they are, what they ate for breakfast, the color of their shoes, and their political affiliation.
Posted by Chris @ 21:59 on 04/18/04
This really burns me up.
Truth be known, "sprawl" lowers both commuting times and congestion. Any way you slice it, there's a strong statistical correllation between low population density and low commuting times. In fact, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project, Houston ranks 18th in terms of the percentage of congested daily travel. That's pretty good considering that we're the fourth largest city in the entire country (for comparison, New York ranks 13th, Chicago ranks 3rd, and LA ranks 1st).
Ergh!
Posted by Owen Courrèges @ 01:19 on 04/19/04
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