An op-ed by international human factors and rail safety expert Professor Najmedin Meshkati was published in yesterday's Daily News. The title is "Expo Line Approval: A License to Kill?":
The L.A. Country Metropolitan Transportation Authority and its Exposition Light Rail Construction Authority with their army of lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and PR agencies, which are all paid from our tax money, are vigorously pushing and asking for CPUC approval of their at-grade crossings near the two schools. However, the local community organizations and the Los Angeles Unified School District are opposing such at-grade design of intersections. The public's distrust of MTA is rooted in its dismal safety record. Ninety people have died on the MTA's 22-mile L.A.-Long Beach Blue Line, which has had more than 821 recorded incidents since its inception in July 1990 to July 2008. These numbers, which are significantly higher than national average rates of accidents and fatalities along the MTA rail network, attest to the dire state of rail safety in LA, which is primarily caused by MTA's outdated and messy safety-related policies, procedures and practices.Here is the full article:
If the CPUC has not learned its lessons about the human factors-related root-causes of past rail accidents, and does not fully scrutinize MTA's proposed crossings' risk and hazard analyses, then CPUC's "easy" approval will be tantamount to granting MTA and its Expo Line Construction Authority a license to kill and maim school children and adults on the Expo Line for the next decades to come, as approximately 72 million Dorsey students who will use the Farmdale Avenue crossing during the expect life of operation of this line. The CPUC's approval would provide MTA with the alibi - the "design immunity" in legalese - for so doing.
Expo Line Approval: A License to Kill?
The Metrolink crash in Chatsworth on Sept. 12, which killed 25 and injured more than 135 innocent people, highlighted the need for much more rigorous government scrutiny of rail safety in the country and especially in Southern California. It is against this sober backdrop that we -- the badly hit Southlanders -- are pleading and looking up to the north for a protector from future rail carnages.
This Thursday, Jan. 29. the five commissioners of the California Public Utilities Commission are expected to vote on and announce their final decision concerning the design of key street crossings in phase 1 of the Exposition Light Rail, or Expo Line, project planned from downtown Los Angeles to Culver City. It will cross major busy city streets such as Vermont, Western, Farmdale and Crenshaw.
There are rare occasions that a San Francisco-based state agency's decision can determine the risk to life and safety of millions school children in Los Angeles for the next 75 to 100 years. However, this CPUC's decision will be a precedent-setting case and there certainly will be future similar cases elsewhere in California, and as such, many more lives will be at risk.
In fact, the term "light rail" is a bit of a misnomer. Each of the three-coupled 225-ton train cars will operate at speeds of up to 55 miles per hour. Expo Line trains will run every 2 to 2.5 minutes, 22 hours a day, in opposite directions on parallel sets of dual tracks and will cross Farmdale Avenue at street level (at-grade), within 10 feet of Dorsey High School, which has 2,100 students, and will cross Western Avenue and Harvard Blvd., also at street level, within 50 feet of the Foshay Learning Center, which is a K-12 Multi-Track School with 3,400 students.
The L.A. Country Metropolitan Transportation Authority and its Exposition Light Rail Construction Authority with their army of lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and PR agencies, which are all paid from our tax money, are vigorously pushing and asking for CPUC approval of their at-grade crossings near the two schools. However, the local community organizations and the Los Angeles Unified School District are opposing such at-grade design of intersections. The public's distrust of MTA is rooted in its dismal safety record. Ninety people have died on the MTA's 22-mile L.A.-Long Beach Blue Line, which has had more than 821 recorded incidents since its inception in July 1990 to July 2008. These numbers, which are significantly higher than national average rates of accidents and fatalities along the MTA rail network, attest to the dire state of rail safety in LA, which is primarily caused by MTA's outdated and messy safety-related policies, procedures and practices.
If the CPUC has not learned its lessons about the human factors-related root-causes of past rail accidents, and does not fully scrutinize MTA's proposed crossings' risk and hazard analyses, then CPUC's "easy" approval will be tantamount to granting MTA and its Expo Line Construction Authority a license to kill and maim school children and adults on the Expo Line for the next decades to come, as approximately 72 million Dorsey students who will use the Farmdale Avenue crossing during the expect life of operation of this line. The CPUC's approval would provide MTA with the alibi - the "design immunity" in legalese - for so doing.
The concept of "design immunity," which is based upon an otherwise obscure California Government Code § 830.6, would potentially entitle MTA to avoid liability for dangerous condition of its designs and grant MTA with complete immunity against any type of claim arising out of its design defect. It was precisely the CPUC's lax approval of the Blue Line's more than 100 crossings back in late 1980s that left us to live with the persistent dangerous condition which is a major root-cause of its many fatalities and accidents (the last two accidents happened just in one day, on Thursday, Nov. 20.)
Moreover, the automatic "design immunity" entitlement of MTA has also been responsible for the status quo, as well as stifling any motivation and imputes within this agency for any fundamental change and systematic safety improvement. Neither numerous deaths and the resulting protracted litigations, nor trail or appeal court's affirmative rulings against MTA in favor of the rail accident's victim (plaintiff), have been able to make a dent in the MTA's dismal safety practices.
This time around, the CPUC approval of MTA's requests for the Expo Line would do the same. It will not only continue to shield MTA's unsafe crossings and operation against any future lawsuits stemming from accidents and resultant injuries and deaths caused by design-induced errors of pedestrians and drivers on the Expo Line, but also will further hardened MTA's entrenched archaic safety culture.
It is truly perplexing that the Exposition Light Rail Construction Authority, even in this dismal state economy, is still continuing to squander millions of dollars of precious taxpayers' money by lavishly paying for thousands of pages of legal briefs, stubbornly fighting neighborhood community organizations, and recklessly disparaging scientific facts which justifiably question and refute its proposed designs. This is the money that should have been spent on making the Expo Line safer and our hope is that the CPUC puts an end to this vicious cycle.
The CPUC of today has much greater competent technical resources and it can (and should) learn from other agencies such as the National Transportation Safety Board and do much better job than what it did some 30 years ago and consequently we are stuck with the Blue Line's unsafe intersections. We can only hope that what the American philosopher William James said, "great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed," also applies to California and its PUC.
Najmedin Meshkati is a professor at the Sonny Astani Department of Civil/Environmental and a professor at the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE) at the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California. He teaches and conducts research on the safety of technological systems and created USC's Transportation Safety Program in 1992. Robert "BJ" Takushi, a recent graduate of the Epstein ISE Department, received a grant from the Rose Hill Foundation to study the Expo Light Rail safety.
