June 01, 2004, 05:01 PM
Westpark and MetroRail: responsible government in action?
Over the last several weeks, county infrastructure officials closed a major ramp from the new Westpark Tollway where it merges onto the southwest freeway. According to the Chronicle's story on the closure,
Art Storey, the county's executive director of public infrastructure, closed the ramp Tuesday out of concern that a combination of heavy traffic in multiple lanes, a tight space for merging and lane-changing, and bad driving habits added up to a recipe for collisions.
Although the toll road itself does not appear to have any major design problems, officials noticed that the merging area on this exit could potentially become a safety issue. Note that not a single accident had to occur before the county observed a couple of close calls via TranStar and decided to close the merging area until better safety features could be installed. A plethora of angry Smart-Growthers wrote their favorite newspaper today to voice complaints about the toll road's alleged poor design, but the fact that Harris County saw a potential problem, stopped it before it was actualized, and promptly took measures to correct it tells me that they are governing responsibly.
In other news, our World Class City's (TM) beloved MetroRail system had its forty-first accident with a car on Thursday. Contrast the way Metro has handled its ubiquitous collision problem to the Westpark case. The situations are certainly similar. Both involve a new transportation system featuring (presumably) new and relatively unfamiliar technologies on new commuter routes. Both have had some bugs to work out in the early days of operation. And both have experienced safety issues including some where the new transportation system itself was not entirely at fault (i.e. the driver erred).
On Westpark, the fact that a safety issue arose merited a prompt response from the county that immediately shut down the problem ramp until modifications could be made. They did this even with full knowledge that the safety problem was being created, in large part, by “bad driving habits” and did not try to pass the safety buck onto those drivers when the potential for a wreck was observed.
Metro, on the other hand, let its train mow down cars on a weekly basis for a couple of months before responding with an $80,000 “study” that simply told it to shift a couple traffic lights around. They presumably did as they were told and the collisions are still happening on a weekly basis. As of the present they have no announced plan to make any safety modifications and the count keeps racking up. Unlike Westpark, no effort was ever made to close the line for safety improvements and virtually nothing has been done safety-wise to keep the vehicles and trains separated - an issue that they should address even if the vehicles are frequently at fault for meandering onto the tracks at improper places. After all, did not the Toll Road supervisors shut down the problem ramp in part because motorists were crossing into the ramp lane before they were supposed to?
I suppose Harris County could take the Metro attitude on its toll road: let the accidents accumulate for months on end and then complain about how horrible Houston drivers are while they remain silent on a real solution. I also have no doubt that many of the people complaining about Westpark's design are from the same crowd that responds to the faultless MetroRail by blaming the cars and looking the other way. But no matter how inconsistently one views the two, a simple unavoidable reality remains: the county toll road people saw a potential problem and immediately fixed it. Metro saw a potential problem, saw that problem materialize some 41 times over the last six months, and has been AWOL in providing a real solution from day one.
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