A tale of two transit systems

If you're a fan of those lists of eerie coincidences (like the old one concerning assassinated presidents Lincoln and Kennedy), you'll love the Chronicle's comparison of Houston's MetroRail line and a new bus rapid transit line in Los Angeles. Both the lines are named for colors (red in Houston, orange in L.A.), both cost $324 million to build and vehicles on both have had problems running into things. We can only imagine transit engineers everywhere breaking out their Magic 8-Balls and taking a hard look at their plans.

L.A.'s Orange Line, on which express buses run a 14-mile route through the San Fernando Valley, opened in late October and has already racked up eight collisions. Houston's Red Line, a 7.5-mile light rail line through the center of the city, has been operating almost two years and had, as of Friday, 121 collisions. Sure, L.A. has In-N-Out and Tom and Katie, but it's clear that we're kicking their butt when it comes to mass transit crashes.

Of course, the interesting thing about the Orange Line/Red Line comparison is that most of Houston's future light-rail lines won't involve trains at all — rather, they'll be dedicated busways, like the new line in L.A., so we can (theoretically) learn something from Angelenos' hit parade. Though both transit lines run in their own "lanes," they're also both at grade, meaning motorists are able to run into the trains and buses. But in L.A., like in Houston, transit officials say the problem lies with motorists, not with the design of the systems. The accident rate in L.A. has drawn considerable fire, even leading some people to call for the line's temporary shutdown until safety problems can be addressed. Drivers have already been instructed to slow down to 10 mph at intersections, and traffic cops have been deployed to certain problem crossings. In Houston, measures like changing traffic light patterns helped cut the accident rate by 75 percent per mile.

Houstonist tends to agree that it's the drivers, not the rail/bus systems, that lead to accidents. Drivers have been at fault in all the collisions on the Orange Line so far, as they have in all but four of Houston's Red Line accidents. We don't know how many times we've read about people who have run into MetroRail trains when they've made illegal left turns on Main Street or run red lights. The bottom line is, neither Houston nor L.A. is used to mass transit in any form but traditional buses, and it's apparently going to take people a long time to get used to the idea that trains and express buses can, and will, hit them.

- And: The latest MetroRail crash derailed the train a little