Accident rates at railroad crossings are a mainstay of computer-assisted reporting, and for good reason - the data is freely available and easy to work with, and the subject is one of near-universal interest. But sometimes the most obvious story - the one that identifies the most dangerous crossings or lines - isn't the best story. After all, no matter how many safety measures are undertaken, there will always be a "most dangerous" crossing, and many times it will have earned that distinction simply because it's the busiest in terms of train or vehicle traffic or both.
Deaths at rail crossings, as it turned out, are relatively rare, at least when compared to ordinary traffic accidents, homicides and other violent causes.
Millions of dollars in federal, state and local funding has been spent in the past three decades to address the most serious crossing hazards, and by most accounts, progress has been made. Accidents and fatalities declined by two-thirds between 1976 and 1987, and since then have remained roughly level despite generally increased traffic.
Not every crossing that needs attention has received it, however, and those that were neglected became the basis for a Fresno Bee package on May 6, 2001.
Reports downloaded
First, the data: Since 1975, the Federal Railroad Administration has kept a database of rail crossing accidents. Railroads file reports, and an FRA contractor enters them into a computer, and the agency makes them available over the Internet at http://safetydata.fra.dot.gov. The same site also provides links to other FRA databases, including its national rail crossing inventory and its records on deaths and injuries among railway workers. The site allows users to query the data directly or download custom extracts in DBF (FoxPro), Access, Excel, Paradox and ACSII formats. I downloaded 25 years of accident data for California in a couple of hours one afternoon last winter and easily loaded them into FoxPro. Then I started doing queries and found well, not a whole lot, actually. Deaths at rail crossings, as it turned out, are relatively rare, at least when compared to ordinary traffic accidents, homicides and other violent causes. For the period from 1996 to 2000, the number of rail crossing fatalities in our six-county circulation area came to the not exactly eye-popping total of nine.
Beat the street
It was time to get out from behind the computer for a while and see if I could find a story that the data wasn't showing me.
Two major rail lines - the Union Pacific and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe - pass through most of the cities and towns of the San Joaquin Valley to link northern and southern California. I resolved to visit every one of their crossings in the heart of our region, Fresno and Madera counties. Maybe, I thought, an idea would strike me after I'd inspected a hundred or so crossings in person.
It didn't take quite that long. After about an hour of looking at crossings on the first of the lines, the BNSF, I was driving in an industrial area south of downtown Fresno. The street I was on paralleled the tracks; another ran parallel on the opposite side. Two other streets - California and Hamilton avenues - crossed both streets and the tracks within a few blocks of each other.
Unlike every other crossing I had seen until then, these two did not have crossing gates, only lights. Vehicles ranging from tamale carts to tractor-trailers skittered over the tracks. Suddenly the lights came on, a bell sounded, and a dark blue double-decked Amtrak California train lumbered into view from the north, blasting its horn. Some of the vehicles ignored the lights until the train was practically upon them. I found two more such crossings in a poor residential neighborhood just north of downtown, and another on the UP line in Selma, a town of 20,000 about 15 miles southeast of Fresno. Later, when I got back to the office and looked in the FRA data, I saw that there had been accidents at each of those crossings. The California Avenue crossing had been the site of eight accidents in 15 years. None was fatal, probably owing to the fact that trains move slowly through that congested area.
Fatals galore
The Selma crossing on North Street was another story. In one six-month period, there had been three accidents, one fatal, and five years earlier there was a double fatal. The story that developed from these discoveries focused on the failure of government agencies to address these hazards. When I interviewed Selma officials, they admitted that they had never applied for money from the federally funded account (called "Section 130") that pays for crossing gates. But when I interviewed the state official in charge of distributing those funds, he told me that the city should have applied. With the poor safety record of that crossing, the application would be likely to get immediate approval and funding.
A county official suggested that I also look at a separate state-funded account that pays for grade separations - bridges and tunnels - to eliminate dangerous and congested crossings.
Anemic fund
That fund is notoriously anemic. The waiting list for appropriations is measured in years. But when I started reading the fund's annual reports, published by the state Public Utilities Commission and posted on its Web site, I came across a curious reference to two Fresno projects that had been stalled. Funds for them, the report said, would be taken back and spent elsewhere.
City officials somewhat sheepishly admitted in subsequent interviews that, yes, they had received authorization from the fund for bridges at two of the city's most-traveled rail crossings, but had to forfeit the money because they couldn't come up with matching funds.
The city's budget documents showed that millions of dollars in discretionary transportation funds were passing through its treasury each year. But instead of setting it aside for the rail projects, the city had been spending much of it on things like new curbs and sidewalks - even tree-trimming - in a handful of residential neighborhoods.
It may not have been the story that I set out to do. But for the families of victims like Ray Sartini Jr., who died when his car was struck by a train at one of those two Fresno crossings, or Jose Patino, the victim in the most recent Selma fatality, the fact that their accidents were relative rarities made their tragedies no less compelling.
Russ Clemings can be reached by e-mail at Clemings@cris.com