Blue Line's safety record

By coincidence, I had just asked Metro (the MTA) for the latest accident numbers on the Blue Line. These are the stats that Metro's press office emailed me Wednesday afternoon and the text is taken straight from my email:

Total Metro Blue Line Fatalities since July 1990-------  90   (Note, 20 of these fatalities have been deemed suicides)

Train vs. vehicle fatalities -----  26

Train vs. Ped. Fatalities -------  64

No fatalities reported on board Metro Rail trains as a result of an accident. No train vs. train accident reported.

Accident rate for FY08 for the Metro Blue Line is 1.71 per 100,000 miles i.e. 29 accidents over 1,692,591 train miles traveled.

Total # of incidents/accidents on the Metro Blue Line since July 1990 ----- 821

Transit vs. Vehicle incidents ----- 652

Train vs. Ped. Incidents ----------- 169

--Steve Hymon

Comments

[bv]

I'm willing to bet the Red Line is at about ZERO such incidents

The fact is a surface level rail in a city as congested LA is not the best idea unless its segregated from the street system.

I think this speaks that rail on the cheap, ie sharing the streets with cars, is not in LA best interests.

[Chris]

Damien, you ignore the fact that if drivers just obeyed traffic signals - the law - that the vast majority of these accidents and fatalities would never have happened.

Blaming Metro for getting into accidents with people who have run red lights and made illegal turns is kind of like blaming victims of sexual assault for inviting it by wearing provocative clothing.

[Gary Kavanagh]

Looking at those numbers it looks like all of those fatalities are basically pedestrians and automobiles putting them selves into harm way, either by purpose in the suicides, or through inattention or recklessly trying to beat the train. The accident today was a bus trying to beat the train. Yes we need to invest in more grade crossings, but it seems to me we have a problem of people failing to understand trains are bigger then they are and faster then they think. Education for road users and pedestrians seems to be in order to me.

[Damien Goodmon]

Here's the comparative study conducted in 2003 by USA Today using APTA stats from 1990-2002, when the Blue Line had only killed 61:

Los Angeles (Blue Line): 61
San Diego: 22
Portland: 14
Sacramento: 14
San Jose: 9
San Francisco: 8
Philadelphia: 8
Boston: 6
Denver: 6
Salt Lake City: 5
Baltimore: 4
Dallas: 3
New Orleans: 2
St. Louis: 2
Buffalo: 2
Cleveland: 0
Newark: 0

Regardless of whether the system was older and had FEWER MITIGATION MEASURES, had more riders or traveled more track miles in all categories the Blue Line was the deadliest.

On the cheap is right. We make concessions here that they don't in similar cities like New York, Chicago, and Tokyo. The backbone of their systems are subways and elevated tracks, not street-running lines on old freight right-of-ways.

[Damien Goodmon]

Notice how every other transportation entity measures their statistics on a per MILLION mile basis, but the Blue Line does it on a per HUNDRED THOUSAND mile basis.

On your blog you posted that that the state average for vehicular accidents was 1.09 per million vehicle miles.

Blue Line's accident rate for FY08 is 17.1 per MILLION train miles.

And FY08 was a "good year!"

Comparing the fatality rates is even worse:

The Blue Line fatality rate was 1.77 per million train miles. Which sounds low.

But, again per your blog the vehicular fatality rate is 0.018 per million vehicle miles.

Light rail and commuter rail transportation agencies throughout the country rail safety these statistics for far too long in this region by talking "PASSENGER" miles instead of revenue miles. (Metrolink is the only thing on our roads more deadly than light rail.)

Here's the difference:
30 people on a train that goes 10 miles is logged as:
300 PASSENGER miles
But it's only 10 REVENUE miles.

Passenger mile figures might be helpful in determining whether the Metro customers are safe on light rail, but just like one should think twice about buying a Geo prism in a city full of H2 Hummers, it makes the rest of us more susceptible to a preventable hazard.

[LKitsch]

How does this compare with other cities? Probably much higher. Again, another example of one of the results of building an urban transit system on the cheap---too many grade crossings and opportunities for accidents. This is not Portland. You cannot expect to build a bare bones system, and make big compromises on safety features, route alignments and modes, and expect it to adequately serve a huge city like Los Angeles. We spare no expense when it comes to building roads and freeways---I guess that is where our priorities are.