Houston's light rail really is taking cars off the road:
Once called the "train to nowhere," Houston's new rail line between downtown and the Astrodome is earning a few new nicknames: "Danger Train," the "Wham Bam Tram," "A Streetcar Named Disaster."The Wham-Bam-Tram counter web site is here. Its authors acknowledge that the overt cause of all these crashes is driver error,More than 50 collisions have occurred along the 7.5-mile route since it opened in November, most of them with cars making illegal turns across the tracks.
Rail promoters promised the sleek, gray trains would take cars off the road — "They've just done it one car at a time," said John Gaver, who started the Wham-Bam-Tram counter, a Web site that tallies each crash.
But, with a 6-month average of almost 2 crashes a week, it becomes clear that the root cause of these crashes is that the serious design flaws of the Wham-Bam-Tram itself, provoke driver error.Sound Transit Light Rail is also expected to produce more than its fair share of destruction. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at August 11, 2004 10:33 AM | Email This