I think it is because the train resides outside your peripheral vision, but proceeds fast enough to “sneak” up on you (or sidle, if you will).
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that a monorail system would have beem more expensive than light rail. Given that Harris County voters were too cheap to save the Astrodome, I have to think they’d want to save as much money as possible.
Well, that would make more sense if there weren’t flashing lights in your face or gates you had to drive around. I suppose the horns are a better gauge of the closeness of the train, though.
If saving money was a big consideration in implementing light rail, Houston voters have considerable cause for regret.
*"Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin are all among the top 20 fastest growing major cities in the nation. However, the three cities with various levels of rail transit, Dallas, Houston and Austin, all have declining transit ridership trends and have fewer absolute transit riders today than they had a dozen years ago. They have spent billions to implement and promote transit with a heavy focus on rail transit.
…
These data highlight a number of broader Texas Metro Area negative transit trends:
- Metro areas with more rail transit have significantly higher costs and higher taxpayer subsidies per ride.
- Metro areas with more rail transit have fewer total transit boardings per capita.
- Metro areas with higher densities have fewer transit riders (boardings) per capita.
- Dallas has the largest population and greatest population density but the least cost effective transit system: Higher cost per ride (boarding) and fewer boardings per capita.
- Increasing the proportion of a region’s transit funds being spent on rail transit leads to less cost effective overall transit and degraded transit for the majority of transit riders who still ride busses."*
My take is that light rail is one of the biggest urban boondoggles, along with subsidizing pro sports teams.
I don’t know, it might just be something do do with the local culture. Maybe Houstonians just prefer to drive. Portland, OR seems to have a thriving light rail system.
I can’t think of a single crossing in Madison with two tracks. There are a few places with two tracks maybe a couple hundred feet apart, but each track has separate lights, gates, etc.
Yeah, there are some weird intersections. I’ve lived and driven in Houston for seven years now and I’m still often nervous driving around the streets by the rail. Maybe its the inconsistency that’s the problem. You get used to how the intersections are downtown, and then you go to the Med Center and they’re different and it throws you off and you have a brain fart and pull out at the wrong time and get hit.
Right, this guy has no excuse at all. No matter what type of trains or rails or public transportation you are used to, you should know to not drive around gates that are down and lights flashing and cross train tracks. There are some other intersections where it would be much more understandable to mess up and get hit, but not this one.
I would love to use the rail more, and I think other people would too, if it was more useful. It’s very limited though, there’s just one long line. I looked up the Portland light rail, and it doesn’t look very expansive but it does have four different lines. If the Houston rail expanded, covered more of the city, I think the per person subsidies would go down, but I don’t know how soon or likely that is to happen.
It’s going to happen eventually but in a weird way. We won’t have any lines running along 59 or 610 or the Katy or anything like that. We may one day be fortunate enough to have a line out to each airport, though. IAH would be easier, because it’s just too built up around Hobby. The proposed Gold and Purple lines are fairly promising.
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, there’s a bit of an identity crisis. Some former council members, congress members, and mayors took it on themselves to make any future possibility of rail in Houston difficult to impossible to implement. That we have any rail at all means history was against them. That ridership has exceeded initial estimates (all the while some people still deride it as a toy train that goes nowhere people want to be) means their obstruction simply produced unjustified expenses to us now and in the future.
Last Sunday, the back page for my local newspaper amounted to “three idiots get stuck on train rails in a car, too drunk and/or stupid to even realize they should get the hell out of it and warn rail company; a neighbor saves their sorry asses; train delayed half an hour, idiots charged with among other things ‘behavior endangering public health’*”. The caption to one of the pics: “driver and another one of the vehicle’s occupants taking a selfie in front of the ‘railway crossing’ sign.”
It would be nice if people who really want a Darwin Award would refrain from getting others mixed in their pursuit.
- A nifty crime that’s on the books for the kind of dangerous behavior that our legislators simply hadn’t thought of. It’s used to turn things that would otherwise be a string of relatively-minor stuff (such as driving with a BAC = 5 times the legal limit like that guy did, max penalty is a huge fine and losing your license) into something that can get you jailed.
[Gate starts coming down]
Passenger: “I dare you to cross the tracks now”
Driver: [vroom vroom…] “Sweet! I made it! In your face!”
Passenger: “OK, I dare you to make a u-turn and do it again”
Driver: “Are you insane? No way.”
Passenger: “I double-dog dare you”
Driver: “Oh shit. OK, here goes…”
[vroom vroom…CRASH]
I don’t want to derail (ha!) this thread, but as a recent Houston émigré and ex-DangerTrain rider, could one of the Houston Dopers here ID this intersection? Just curious.
What a waste of a perfectly good SUV. Idiot.
I like that law. I wish we had it in the U.S. for use against anti-vaxxers.
I can see no way in which this could go horribly wrong.*
*Tongue firmly in cheek. People will always find a way.
I couldn’t tell just from the video, but there’s a link to the story at KHOU, and it said it’s the intersection of Fannin and Naomi, near Reliant Stadium.
Looks somewhat like the section on Greenbriar/Fannin south of the Medical Center. I can’t make out the cross street, though.
Even if it’s not, it’s definitely on the southern end below the Medical Center and around Reliant Park.
ETA: Found an article saying this was Fannin at Naomi, which is just north of the 610 loop and one of the Reliant Park exits. From the video, the driver must have been leaving Reliant Park at the time.
Thanks Sam Lowry and Great Antibob. I kind of had a feeling it was around that area, but couldn’t tell.
I’ll probably regret asking, but why would TPTB think that grade-level rail, instead of a monorail, would make the city more attractive for the Olympics?
For the large number of drivers so nearsighted as to be almost legally blind, horns are a great help providing they still retain hearing.
Moron? Way to go, dude. I simply posted that we had a option to do a smart thing (monorail) as opposed to a dumb thing (grade-level crossings). TPTB at the time chose the dumb thing. The tracks go straight down the middle of some of the busiest streets in Houston and the warning bells/lights/arms don’t work quickly enough. Never have.
Yes, there are jerks who will try to go around them. And here’s a newsflash for you, mhendo, you jerkoff: they exist in all 50 states, not just Texas.
Las Vegas is a example of a functional monorail. It took a while for it to shake out the bugs, but once they did, it works great.
And no, it would have been cheaper. For one thing, the rail construction caused I don’t know how many businesses along Main and Fannin to go bankrupt. I don’t believe monorail construction would have done that.
I didn’t realize that a monorail floats in the air without any ground construction required.