Until now, I’d assumed that the people who have been hit by light rail in the Twin Cities were wearing ear buds and spacing out. I figured they were the kind of people who strolled straight down the rails and on the shoulders of busy streets, who crossed against red lights and took chances. Now I wonder if they were just like me, a bit confused and in a very wrong place at the wrong time.<\/p>\n
I’m a regular bus commuter and no stranger to public transit, but I’d ridden light rail only once before. I decided at the last minute to catch it to work in downtown St. Paul. I was by Raymond Avenue dropping off a kid at summer camp, so I parked my car on a side street and walked down to University Avenue, where I could see the Raymond Avenue Station to my left halfway down the block. The pedestrian light turned green, and I walked across University’s westbound traffic lane. I figured there would be a sidewalk running up the middle of the street from the intersection to the station. Makes sense, right?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
[The Transit cops who yelled at her after her close call]\u00a0told me about the two people who have been hit and killed on the Green Line. They told me about a woman who was standing between train lines who was knocked by one train toward another oncoming train and who survived only because the fast-thinking driver of the oncoming train sped up so she fell into the side of the train rather than into its path. I later looked up the statistics. Eight pedestrians have been struck since testing began in January 2014 on the Green Line between downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul.<\/p>\n
“In your defense, that intersection isn’t well designed,” one cop finally conceded, as he mellowed in the face of my contrite confession. “People get confused.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/strong>In my day job, I try to design things to make sense for real people. \u00a0And the design of the Central Corridor’s stations astounds me.<\/p>\nYet again – big government at work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I predicted in June, 2014 that the “Green Line” – the light-rail between downtown Minneapolis and downtown Saint Paul – would kill three people and account for a dozen vehicle accidents in its first year. \u00a0It turned out to be two dead, I’m not sure how many vehicle accidents – and even more injured pedestrians […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trains-and-automobiles","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54782,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54781\/revisions\/54782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}