What do you think of a town removing all of it's railroad crossings and making people have to drive longer?

Question

In the town of Belen, NM, where the railyard is located, they have recently removed all of the railroad crossings thus creating more dead end streets. They built a bridge allowing for passage over the train tracks at one point only. This has people driving around for more miles to get to the other side where crossings used to be.

Answer 1

I live in a town (Crawley, West Sussex, England) which has level crossings on two main roads into the town centre - and 4 trains an hour using the line, so they are closed very frequently. I'm not sure if closure would make much difference - people tend to try to avoid them anyway as there are other ways to get to the centre of town. I agree witht he answer about closure preventing deaths. A teenager was killed on one some months ago. Much beating of b*****s about the sad loss of a young life (which it undoubtedly was to his family), but it ignored the fact that the individual concerned was trying to beat the gates.

Answer 2

An unfortunate necessity.

Idiots will not keep in the clear at road crossings, despite any warning devices or no.  So, to protect the drunks and idiots God misses such drastic measures are needed.

Whether it saves lives or not will never be known for sure, but in the long run it probably will.  It will definitely eliminate any future liability the city or railroad must bear when a jerk sends his defective genes into oblivion....

Answer 3

Beats the h**l out of people dying

and that is what happens at crossings, eventually.

The idiot-proof corssing has not been invented

thank them for caring about your safety

and you can thank them for a good night's sleep, train horns are awfully noisy, now you wont have to listen to them quite as much.

On behalf of the train crews working through there, thank you Belen, one of the most stressful parts of our job just got a bit easier.

Answer 4

That sounds stupid.

Maybe they're planning to  build crossings at the other points later.

Answer 5

As others point out, it's a life-saver, and it is COMMON in cities and towns that have a YARD or other high-traffic rail.

Here in San Carlos, California they eliminated ALL rail crossings, ELEVATED the rails on a 5 mile long berm, and then made a few strategic crossings UNDER the rails.  This GRADE-SEPARATION project took 4 years and cost MILLIONS.

BUT since it was completed in 2000, there hasn't been a SINGLE death on that stretch of tracks.  AND Traffic has actually been reduced on the streets.