LRT’s darkest day shows chronic danger of level crossings
The thought of it makes us gasp in anguish — a little six-year-old girl, panicked by sudden lights and bells in front of her, turns back into the path of a CTrain and is killed.
How horrible for the child and her family. Such a life-changing disaster for the blameless CTrain operator, whose mind will surely replay this ghastly split second for life.
It happened at 162nd Avenue and Shawville Rise. Hours later, a man was killed on a level crossing at the Erlton station.
Monday may have been the darkest day in the history of Calgary’s LRT system.
This isn’t just bad luck or inattention. And please, please, don’t blame the parents.
Every time this happens, the focus should fall on politicians and experts who built the LRT, and to this day keep adding these often confusing and dangerous level crossings.
The tragic stories go back decades.
“I said back in 1991 that we move cattle safer than we’re moving our citizens,” says Allan Hunter, whose grandmother was killed at a crossing on Jan. 12 that year.
“Now I’m devastated again. My heart breaks for another family.”
Hunter twice ran for mayor in Calgary, each time making LRT safety an issue.
He then was elected councillor in Airdrie for two terms. But he never stopped advocating for LRT safety in Calgary.
Some time ago, he was in the northwest near a crossing where an elderly woman walked across the tracks, then looked back to wait for her husband.
She watched him hit and killed. “What have we learned?” Hunter asks. “Apparently nothing. I can say it hasn’t gotten better.
“There’s more and more people crossing. But they continue to put these level crossings in, for the simple reason that it saves money.
“We all understand that if you put it underground, or raise the station, it costs more money. But what is the value of all these lives?
“It’s absolutely tragic for families to be burying loved ones for something that can be avoided.”
Hunter notes that LRT lines are always funded jointly by the city, the province and Ottawa. He calls for the city’s partners to refuse funding lines that include wide-open level crossings.
Dave Fryett, an engineer and frequent urban critic, said in a Herald comment that he used to live near the 162nd Avenue crossing where the girl was killed.
“When the LRT was proposed we advocated for the underpass to be built with the LRT extension,” Fryett said.
“The city’s reply was that it was too expensive and they had better things to build with the money, more urgent needs in the inner city.
“I thought it was a mistake. It seems the city has seen pedestrian fatalities just about everywhere the LRT crosses a major road.”
Allan Hunter’s grandmother, Robina Hunter, was 76 when she was killed.
Twelve years later, in 2003, Hunter heard that another woman of the same age had died.
When that news came over his car radio, he was flooded with emotions so powerful that he had to pull off the road. Hunter had seen his grandmother’s death reported on TV before he knew she was the victim.
“Then we got the call. And I’d already seen her purse, the running shoe lying there.”
Hunter made those comments to me in 2003. On Monday, he said: “And how about the paramedics who had to deal with this child? How about the operator, the police officers?”
By 2003, 35 people had already been killed. Today’s total is close to 80. Suicide may account for a third of those, but that in itself is a mark again of a system that makes it so easy.
Hunter points out the obvious danger to slower-moving seniors. But our juniors are also endangered by this terrible planning, as a grieving city learned Monday.