(The following article by Jon Davis was posted on the Chicago Daily Herald website on January 9.)
CHICAGO — The latest version of a rule requiring trains to blow horns at every crossing has suburban leaders cautiously optimistic they can dodge the law and keep things quiet.
The Federal Railroad Administration’s latest proposal has new wiggle room for cities and villages that want to keep their declared “quiet zones” intact, and do so affordably.
Joy Schaad, director of community liaison for the Chicago Area Transportation Study, said more flexibility is better, but the rule is still burdensome.
“It’s a little bit better,” but many suburbs will still have to spend time, effort and money adding safety measures to hundreds of crossings “that were never unsafe in the first place,” she said.
Schaad and local officials got a close-up look at the government’s latest effort at a workable rule, which is scheduled to take effect in December, at a meeting in Chicago this week.
Though the changes are welcome, some question whether they’ll really make life quieter or just create new, recurring headaches.
“If we resolve it the first time, will it change?” asked Arlene Mulder, village president of Arlington Heights, where thousands of residents live in new downtown condominiums adjacent to the Union Pacific Railroad’s Northwest Line.
Elburn Village President Jim Willey said he’s grateful the rule appears to end the regulatory limbo that has thwarted his town’s attempts to establish a “quiet zone” before Metra trains start operating there in late 2005.
“Now at least we have a set of rules and we feel like we’re back in the game on this,” Willey said.
Whether towns can declare certain grade-level rail crossings to be “quiet zones” — where train horns are prohibited except in emergencies — will partially be based on a town’s safety record at those crossings.
“So if they have a good safety record, that’s taken into account,” FRA spokesman Warren Flatau said.
The FRA has an online “Quiet Zone Calculator” that local officials can use to see if their crossings qualify to be quiet zones or if more safety measures would be needed first.
The calculator looks at myriad factors, including the number of trains and vehicles going over a crossing daily, what safety measures are present and how many accidents have occurred there in the last five years.
Lombard Village President Bill Mueller said village officials are using the calculator to try to determine whether the Elizabeth Street and Finley Road crossings along the Union Pacific West Line comply with the new rules. They hope Lombard will be allowed to keep its quiet zone.
The Grace Street crossing, which re-opened last year with new concrete median barriers, was rebuilt thanks to matching funds Lombard got because it was part of the larger St. Charles Road reconstruction project. No such funds are available if the other crossings need to be rebuilt, Mueller said.
“Our concern is that being a community that has three crossings and a station all within a mile, that if we don’t comply and they enact the whistle program, they’ll be on the whistle all the way through town,” Mueller said.
Larry Bury, transportation director for the 50-member Northwest Municipal Conference, said the calculator is fantastic “in theory,” but complained it is often off-line and contains incorrect information. No real assessment of its value can be made until the problems are corrected, he said.
The FRA proposal lets the local risk factor be averaged over all crossings within a current or proposed quiet zone.
In Arlington Heights that means the village’s eight grade crossings paralleling Northwest Highway can be considered as one quiet zone, not eight individual ones. Improvements made at one crossing in the group could be enough to qualify all eight for “quiet zone” status.
However, Mulder is skeptical, pointing out that since the national risk threshold will be recalculated every year, she wonders if decisions made now will be valid for 10 or 20 years, or just two or three years.
“We want to know those decisions will stand for a number of years,” she said.
The debate over train horns stems from a 1991 emergency order that overturned quiet zones in towns along the Florida East Coast Railway between Jacksonville and Miami.
Horn blowing was further mandated when it was written into the 1994 Federal Railroad Safety Authorization Act, but it never has been enforced. Instead, it was debated and discussed before a series of public hearings were held nationwide in 2000.
Trains would have had to blow their horns at each crossing, unless towns took any of four steps — at every crossing — to keep their quiet zones: make streets one-way, install 120-foot median barriers, close the crossing, or install “quadrant gates” with four arms instead of two at a cost of $300,000 to $500,000 each.
Led by Chicago’s suburbs, which had established a strong grade-crossing safety record, municipalities nationwide revolted against that version, arguing a blanket approach wouldn’t fit both rural and urban situations.
The FRA is taking public comments on the new version through Feb. 17, although several suburbs are lobbying Congressional representatives to extend that deadline.