What’s new to Houston, causing a big ruckus, and soon headed to Charlotte? If you said the Vince Lombardi Trophy you’d only be half-right. No, Houstonians are in flux over their new light rail set-up. By flux I mean they keep running into the trains with their cars.
You see, the new light rail schemes that have been grafted on top of existing streets in Houston, Dallas, Salt Lake City, and elsewhere in recent years have to ban certain vehicle traffic maneuvers as railroad tracks are, shall we say, inflexible. In Houston, left turns are forbidden across some streets when the trains are running. (I have a suspicion light rail fans like this anti-car aspect of train-running, as it “incentivizes” Joe Motorist to abandon his wheels.)
But in Houston the complaint is that the signage for the no-left zones is confusing and there have been calls to put up actual guardrails around the tracks. Of course, guardrails are a non-starter with these types of rail systems which suppose that pedestrians will want to weave in and around the tracks in between trains. Indeed, the tracks cannot be separated from pedestrians, a fact that the city of Baltimore discovered a few years back when their new light rail system kept hitting people. This is part of pedestrian-friendly development, we’ve been told.
Maybe all the South End light rail boosters — and consultants and lobbyists and construction firms and hangers-on — in Charlotte have a plan to avoid Houston’s troubles, but I sure haven’t heard it.
