I wish I got a photo of this, but It was unexpected.
Yesterday eve, (5:53PM, yah I noted the time) my lovely wife and I were driving east on Washington, in the left-turn-only lane at Broadway... You know those "train coming" signs that light up to warn you not to cross the tracks when the Metro is coming? Well, the metro was coming, and not only did the warning light NOT light, but the left arrow came on directing me to turn left right into the oncoming train!
I suppose the light was green on Hill street, as the train pulled a panic stop which left it's ass end hanging out on to Broadway. There was also an eastbound, but it looked stopped a couple blocks down.
So, do these failures happen often? Anyone else been directed to their doom by a friendly green arrow recently? How about we junk the automatic lights in favor of one big permanently lit sign saying (in four languages) LOOK OUT FOR TRAINS!!!1!!
UPDATE: This was about 3/4 of a mile from where a Metro train hit a bus back on Sept. 19, less than two weeks earlier. No published reports (that google turned up in two minutes of searching) reported the cause, but I have to wonder if the bus was victim of the same... Green arrow of DOOM!!1!
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
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3 comments:
I hope you reported it. Don't let this go unnoticed.
I'm sure the engineer driving the train noticed all the cross traffic he/she had to avoid hitting, so I expect that Metro knows this happened (and if they don't, they have a serious problem with system monitoring.) However, a nastygram from me would at least let the powers know that a non-metro employee saw the failure too.
I'm not exactly sure who to report it to, though. Searching the metro.net site reveals contacts for scheduling a Transit Safety presentation, but I haven't found any safety complaint contact yet.
Browne or BusTard probably know who to contact, I'll ask them.
Try Ginny Case. I'm sure she'll know.
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