(The following story by Billy Townsend appeared on the Tampa Tribune website on July 20.)
LAKELAND, Fla. — Count slowly to 74.
Now, as you’re counting, imagine you are sitting in your car, waiting at a train crossing. You are late for picking up your child at day care. To your left, you see that the slow-moving freight train is still a speck in the distance, and you see that the crossing rail in front of you leaves a space through which to drive with some maneuvering. You’ll easily make it.
Finally, imagine this is your neighborhood, where you find yourself in this position regularly, perhaps daily.
Now ask yourself, “Why would anyone be so reckless as to drive around a crossing gate?”
That’s the question that’s been repeated over and over again in the wake of Monday’s Lakeland train crash that killed four young adults at the Wabash Avenue crossing and a similar nearby crash that killed a teenager a month earlier. In each case, the driver of the doomed car drove around crossing gates and was struck by a fast-moving Amtrak train.
Those crashes were clearly the fault of the drivers. But excessive delays at these crossings, caused by freight traffic that shares track with passenger trains, may spur reckless behavior, according to federal officials and a 2004 study.
Although technology exists to fix those delays, it has not been adopted along this stretch of track. That means the crossings’ sensors can’t tell the difference between slow-moving freight traffic and much faster Amtrak trains.
The sensors that trigger adequate warning for an Amtrak train doing 75 mph can’t tell it apart from a freight train rumbling in at 25 mph. At the Wabash Avenue crossing, where visibility is good, that means motorists often have to wait behind the gates for more than a minute for the arrival of a freight train they can see far in the distance. That doesn’t count the time it takes for the train to pass by.
On a recent afternoon, two successive freight trains took 1 minute and 4 seconds and 1 minute and 14 seconds respectively to reach the crossing after setting off the safety equipment. The time stamp on the video of Monday’s crash shows that the Amtrak train reached the crossing in 22 to 24 seconds. That’s just above the federal minimum requirement of 20 seconds. A 2004 federal study recommends a constant warning time of 30 seconds for all trains.
“Any actual time greater than this is excess down time, creating delay to highway users,” the study says. It adds later in a footnote that “times longer than 30 seconds are thought to cause impatience in some share of drivers.”
Russian Roulette
Amtrak passenger trains make up only a small fraction of the rail traffic on this stretch of track in the west Lakeland area. The far-slower freight trains are the bulk of it. And they regularly shut down this heavily traveled crossing for minutes at a time each day.
The disparity between the long freight waits and the quicker Amtrak passings “can be an inducement to crossing violations,” said Warren Flatau, a spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration. Mingled with fast-moving passenger trains, those waits can be “a recipe for people to get into collisions,” Flatau said.
In the aftermath of Monday’s crash, many area residents admitted to having driven around the rails to beat trains, citing the types of waits and disruption the freight traffic causes. Some said they did so regularly.
Yet, Monday’s fatal crash appears to be the first since 1979 at the Wabash crossing, the eighth busiest of the Lakeland area’s 71 crossings, with more than 12,000 cars crossing each day, according to federal records.
That might be explained by how easy it is to beat a freight train after the gates come down. A large truck, from a dead stop, can drive across the three rail lines at the Wabash crossing in 4 or 5 seconds. A person can walk across it at a normal clip in about 9 seconds. With more than a minute to spare before a freight train bears down, it is easy to see how accidents at this crossing have been scarce, despite the anecdotal evidence of rampant gate running.
The problem, aside from the illegality and danger of racing the freight trains, is that the much-faster Amtrak trains occasionally roar by. There are three significant crossings in this part of west Lakeland, counting Wabash. Each one has seen an Amtrak train hit a vehicle in the past six months.
A video of the Wabash crash shows that the doomed 2004 Pontiac approached from a street parallel to the tracks, with the train behind it, just as the safety equipment activated. It then turned left onto Wabash, ducked around the crossing gate and appeared to accelerate into the crossing – all without ever fully stopping. All four victims were familiar with the neighborhood, and some of them had lived there.
Did the driver assume he or she was ahead of a freight train and had plenty of time to clear the track? It’s impossible to know. But it’s a virtual mathematical certainty that if the Amtrak train had been a freight train, the Pontiac would have easily made the crossing safely.
On Tuesday, the day after the crash, CSX officials appeared to be timing how long it took trains to reach the crossing. CSX owns the tracks, and Amtrak leases access to them.
The 2004 study for the U.S. Department of Transportation recommends a constant warning time for all trains of 30 seconds between the time they trigger the safety equipment and arrive at the crossing. There are various technologies available for providing that.
The study is a voluminous cost-benefit analysis of adopting a sophisticated train and vehicle traffic management system for the Long Island Rail Road. It was prepared by the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, a research organization within the U.S. Department of Transportation.
One of the study’s authors, Douglass B. Lee Jr., said a number of previous research studies have shown that 30 seconds is a rough marker for when a train wait becomes perceived as unreasonable by some drivers. He added that perception varies based on the circumstances of individual drivers and crossings.
“The [gates] go down and people expect a train in a reasonable amount of time,” Lee said.
Asked whether wait times longer than a minute are unreasonable, he answered flatly, “Yes.”
None of the crossings in this stretch has a constant warning time, according to Gary Sease, a CSX spokesman. They are not able to ascertain speed differences.
It Could Get Worse
This issue has implications beyond just the recent crashes because most scenarios for providing more commuter rail in Florida involve using existing freight lines, without clearing off all the freight traffic.
Preliminary discussions of a Tampa Bay commuter system envision using existing CSX lines.
While that’s just speculation, the state is in the process of negotiating a very real half-billion dollar deal with CSX to help it reorganize its freight traffic and to provide 61 miles of commuter rail service for the Orlando area on one of CSX’s two prime lines. The commuter service will share the line with a somewhat diminished number of daily freight trains.
The deal would move much, but not all, of the Orlando freight traffic west to what’s known as the “S” line, which runs from Jacksonville through Ocala and meets an east-west stretch of track in Plant City.
From there, much of the increased freight traffic on the S line will head east through this precise stretch of track into downtown Lakeland and on to the massive hub that CSX wants to build in south Winter Haven.
CSX projects that four large additional freight trains a day will move through Lakeland when the reorganization is completed, by 2009 or 2010. There is not a firm estimate for traffic increases as business grows at the hub, which will focus on distribution of consumer goods and vehicles.
In other words, freight traffic – and the delays it breeds – will be increasing on this stretch, and the Amtrak trains aren’t going anywhere.
Concerned about the impact on their downtown, Lakeland government and business officials have started to investigate what’s known as a quiet zone – a stretch where trains don’t blow their whistles.
But the rail administration requires that crossings in a quiet zone as busy as downtown Lakeland be equipped with constant warning time. None of downtown’s four major crossings has constant warning time capability.
Paying for it is the responsibility of local or state government, not CSX or Amtrak.
Across Florida, CSX builds and maintains its crossings over public roads, but the public pays the bills. CSX bills state and local governments millions every year for crossing construction and maintenance but doesn’t submit invoices or other documents to justify its charges. Governments that balk risk having a railroad crossing shut down.