Homes near tracks: 'Tragedy waiting to happen'

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jul 4, 2005 | by Matt O'Brien, STAFF WRITER

HAYWARD

ASK UNION PACIFIC Railroad Company officials what they think of Hayward's most anticipated redevelopment project of the next few years, and they'll tell you it sounds like a nightmare.

"We just don't understand why zoning would permit residential construction next to railroads," said a frustrated John Bromley, Union Pacific's chief spokesman, as he learned of the city's plans to transform a desolate cannery district into a bustling new urban village.

Roughly 800 high-density homes -- plus a new elementary school, contiguous park space and maybe a coffee shop or two -- are slated for this old industrial parcel just west of downtown.

But a Union Pacific-owned railroad track that hosts the third- busiest Amtrak route in the country runs right through the middle.

And as city planners begin coordinating the proposed development projects that will straddle the busy Capitol Corridor line, they face a challenge that attracts little attention:

There are no local ordinances that govern how the city of Hayward should address railroad safety concerns, and there is a dearth of state and federal laws on the subject.

There is little money to pay for the bridge that planners dream of building so that pedestrians can safely cross from parks to homes, over the tracks that were once part of the Southern Pacific system.

And it is unlikely that railroad safety activists will crowd meetings of the Hayward Planning Commission, demanding that the city ensure this project is safe.

Except, maybe, Rico Richard Sr.

His son was killed by an Amtrak train eight years ago in this industrial area south of West A Street, and as the neighborhood plans to sprout new homes, he shudders at the thought that something like his son's death could reoccur.

"It's a tragedy waiting to happen," Richard said. "I wonder if they've thought about the consequences and dangers there. If not, we're still going to hear about these incidents, year after year."

Terrie Prosper, spokeswoman for the California Public Utilities Commission, said the PUC is pushing the Federal Railroad Administration -- the agency responsible for railroad safety -- to take a stronger role in helping to mitigate California's rail safety problems.

Increased urbanization in California, along with increasing demand for rail traffic, has led to the escalation of a longstanding conflict between communities and railroads. And years of efforts by the PUC and some state lawmakers to make their own rail safety rules have failed, PUC lawyer Patrick Berdge said.

"Right now the states are pretty much federally pre-empted, and that really doesn't do any good," Berdge said.

Among the PUC's own planned initiatives, however, is an effort to identify new construction projects that could adversely impact rail safety and then provide enough information so that safety can be addressed before the project is built.

"We're trying to get involved in those developments as early as possible," Berdge said.

Assemblyman Johan Klehs, D-San Leandro, has followed the many San Lorenzo and San Leandro rail deaths that have occurred during his tenure, but he believes lawmakers have limited impact in curbing the human behavior that causes most pedestrian fatalities.

Klehs, following a series of teen deaths on the tracks in the early 1990s, fought to get a law established that promotes railroad safety programs at schools near Amtrak's Capitol Corridor.

"It's a sad fact of life," Klehs said. "All you can do is continue the education."

The resistance

Hayward's proposed project illustrates how railroad companies -- the second largest landholders in California -- view the state that has some of the densest urban populations along American railroad tracks.

Bromley said Union Pacific's Nebraska headquarters gets almost daily calls from East Bay residents complaining about noise and vibration.

California does not have the highest number of railroad accidents. And yet in this state, more than most others, the numbers show that trains are far more likely to strike and kill pedestrians.

But after more than a century of extensive population growth in the East Bay, the safety problems that have caused rifts here between railroad operators, local governments and the residents of increasingly dense neighborhoods have not been solved.

"It took a long time to resolve these things, and a lot of them were never resolved," explains Fremont historian Richard Orsi, author of the book "Sunset Limited" and a professor emeritus at California State University, East Bay. "There are lots of interest groups here. Lots of people are at fault. Lots of different factors cause this in different directions. Everybody's trying to escape from their own liability."

Lawmakers at the federal level also have been pushing the FRA to exert more influence.

U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer this year called for more federal grants for grade-separation projects. And in Sacramento this season, a group of state lawmakers has proposed a new round of railroad safety legislation after tragedies on railroad tracks in Southern California.