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“Sometimes danger is where you least expect it.”
[from Reddit]
Once again, politcs, grade-crossings and quiet zones intersect:
“Parallel steel there’s some sort of attraction to it,” Mark Challed, Metrolink engineers’ supervisor, says over the engines’ roar. “People they can’t seem to stay away.”
So Friesen pumps the yellow button and more and more neighbors along the tracks go to city halls and make their own noise about somehow muffling the horns.
..
But there are costs: Some engineers feel safer hitting the horn, safeguards can require millions of dollars and city officials harbor a lingering concern about lawsuits if accidents do occur.
..
Another, perhaps more daunting hurdle for Santa Ana and other communities: If officials get horns silenced, and an accident occurs, could the city be dragged into a multimillion dollar lawsuit?
“It will be the first lawsuit getting filed in a quiet zone that decides it,” Ross says.
Lot’s of good questions, and no easy answers.
The article also has a good diagram that lays out the “2-quad gates + median” and “4-quad gates” options for quiet zones.
I don’t know what’s worse: that this showed up in my referrer logs, or that my site was the first hit…