(The following article by Alan Gathright and Ryan Kim was posted on the San Francisco Chronicle website on January 27.)
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — It’s a grim reality: California leads the nation in railroad suicides and trespasser deaths, but the state has just $15 million a year to fund projects to separate rail-and-vehicle crossings that cost up to $40 million each.
Even if the state could muster the billions it would take to separate a fraction of its 9,000 street-level rail crossings, officials doubt it would have prevented a suicidal man from abandoning his SUV Wednesday on the railroad tracks in Glendale, triggering a deadly derailment of two commuter trains.
“If someone is intent on suicide, it’s very difficult to stop them from doing that using the train,” Richard Clark, director of consumer protection and safety for the state Public Utilities Commission, which regulates railroad safety, said during a teleconference Wednesday.
Clark said that even if the motorist had been thwarted from accessing the tracks where he did, he could easily have gotten onto the tracks at another crossing that wasn’t separated.
California has consistently led the nation in railroad suicides — 120 from 2000 to 2004, according to the PUC. The state also topped the nation with 84 railroad trespassing fatalities in 2003, the latest figures available from the Federal Railroad Administration. Texas was second with 51 trespassing deaths.
On the Peninsula, Caltrain officials are anxiously watching the investigation unfold in Southern California, hoping to find out what vulnerabilities helped spark the disaster. Caltrain operates in a similar fashion to Metrolink, even employing some of the same trains involved in Wednesday’s crash.
“It’s a very unusual incident,” said Caltrain spokeswoman Jayme Maltbie Kunz. “Usually vehicles don’t have the weight to cause a train to derail, so we’re very interested to see what contributing factors were in this and what lessons we can take from this.”
In October, a Caltrain struck a sedan at a South San Francisco crossing after the driver drove around another car and then stopped on the tracks. Investigators later found the man had a history of suicide attempts, said Maltbie Kunz.
Despite an intense public safety campaign and beefed-up security patrols, Caltrain had nine fatalities on the tracks last year, seven of which were later ruled suicides. In 2002, there were 14 deaths, nine of them ruled suicides.
Caltrain records an average of three train collisions with cars per year, Maltbie Kunz said — although in the past decade a car collision has not derailed a commuter train.
Authorities are considering several ways to stop suicidal intruders or careless trespassers on rail lines, ranging from grade separations (having the road and railroad at different elevations) and fencing to posting closed- circuit cameras to warn train crews that a vehicle or pedestrian are on the tracks.
But the solutions are costly, and funding is scarce.
While it costs between $20 million and $40 million to build one railroad grade separation, the state receives just $15 million annually in federal funding, Clark said. And each project can receive a maximum of $5 million. The rest of the funding has to come from state highway money, local transportation sales taxes or commercial railroads.
“There is a tremendous backlog in applications for the limited funding for grade crossings,” Clark said.
Projects can take years, and billions of dollars. Building more than 100 grade-separations on a 20-mile rail corridor between downtown Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach cost a whopping $3 billion and took a decade, said George Elsmore, the PUC’s head of railroad operations and safety.
The PUC has a priority list of 58 statewide grade-separation projects, choosing crossings with high train or auto traffic and a history of train- vehicle collisions. The four Bay Area rail-crossing improvements on the list are on the Caltrain line in San Mateo County: South Linden Avenue in South San Francisco; San Bruno Avenue in San Bruno; and Poplar and 25th avenues in San Mateo.
Caltrain has 30 grade separations and plans to construct six more beginning in 2006. The list includes five troublesome streets in South San Francisco and San Bruno and one in San Mateo.
Caltrain plans to complete grade separations at the remaining 35 open intersections in the next 20 years, although the timing could be cut in half if state voters approve funding for the state’s high-speed rail project in 2006.