Safety? - No Double Track, Citizens Against Double Track, Northridge Citizens For Environmental Justice

Go to content

Main menu:

Safety?

SAFETY?
CLICK ON ARROW BUTTONS ABOVE TO MOVE THROUGH SLIDES

Any rational, reasonable person will agree that no intelligent individual or entity would deliberately place a railroad track in close proximity to residential homes if space was available to do otherwise. This situation has come about because of terrible planning and a misanthropic decision to dispense with human rights and the safety and quality of lives of those in our neighborhood in the name of moving more trains around. Increasing train traffic is what this is all about, at the expense of innocent human beings who had nothing to do with the shortsighted planning and no reason to believe, prior to this disturbing Double Track proposal, that their collective safety could be so threatened and their quality of life so objectionably degraded. Who would expect setback regulations in Canada and the city of Stockton, California to be reasonable and humane, while those in Los Angeles allow human beings to be treated with no more consideration than expendable refuse on the side of the road?
 
 
Accidents Happen
Accidents happen, from aging materials, human error, delayed maintenance, just to name a few examples. Running massive trains close to residential homes is misanthropic.  Frankly, anyone who would purposely build a railroad track within less than 50 feet of residential property lines has no respect for the rights of such residents.  In Canada, there is a specified setback of 98 feet (30 meters) by law between tracks and residences.  Even in Northern California, in the City of Stockton, there is a mandated setback of 85 feet between train tracks and residential structures.  All citizens of Los Angeles should be sickened to learn that there currently exists NO setback law protecting residents from having a train track suddenly installed a demonstrably UNSAFE distance from their homes.  (See more about derailment dangers from Steering Committee members Briana and Rick Guardino on the Neighbors United page).

TRACK SHIFT = INCREASED HAZARD

Newton's first law of motion - sometimes referred to as the law of inertia.

Newton's first law of motion is often stated as:    An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

The current single track behind our residential homes is straight.  Metro has proposed creating the double track through a design called a "Track Shift" which will mean using a portion of the current track to connect to a new track section "north" of the current track, and using another portion of the current track to connect to a new track section "south" of the current track.  The diagrams below illustrate how this proposed "Track Shift" would work.  In essence, creating a "Track Shift" means causing a straight track to "shift" to one side or another.  The worst possible place to create a shift of this kind on not just one but two parallel "heavy rail" railroad tracks is within a residential neighborhood -- OUR residential neighborhood.  But that is exactly what Metro / Metrolink is planning to do.  The "Track Shift" would be a much more likely location for a derailment than any perfectly straight section of railroad track.  Remember, the current single track we have now is straight.  It should be left alone and intact.  One hundred and two years with a perfect safety record is empirical proof.
 
Back to content | Back to main menu