Having already pledged to abolish train horns in the northern end of the city, Palo Alto is now shifting its sights to the rail crossings further south for future inclusion in a citywide “quiet zone.”
The City Council has already approved the creation of a quiet zone near the Palo Alto Avenue intersection at the city’s border with Menlo Park. The project, which is now going through the design phase, is being pursued jointly by the two cities. It entails modifying the roads and medians near the rail crossing to make roads safe enough so that trains would no longer be legally required to sound their horns when they are approaching a crossing.
As that project moves forward, the city is starting to explore additional rail improvements that would stretch the new quiet zone to the south end of the city. On Aug. 21, the council Rail Committee considered ways to turn down the train noise at the Churchill Avenue, Meadow Drive and Charleston Road rail crossings. The leading option at the moment is installation of four-quadrant gates at each of these crossings to block both sides of the street to cars when a train is passing. Currently, the city’s train crossings have two-quadrant gates that only block one side of the street.
For some residents, these improvements can’t come soon enough. John and Menlinda Melnychuck, who live near the Charleston Road rail crossing, were among those who strongly supported the city’s noise-reduction efforts in their neighborhood. Both talked about the disruption from train horns that they experience every day.
“We are constantly blasted,” Melinda Melnychuk said. “We have triple-pane windows our house. We can’t open our windows, we can’t get fresh air.”
To evaluate their alternatives, the city commissioned earlier this year a study by the firm Kimley-Horn and Associates, which surveyed existing safety features and traffic levels used a “risk calculator” to assign risk values to each crossing. To qualify for quiet zones, the city would need to demonstrate that the proposed features would lower the risk index.
Installing quad gates at all three crossings would be the most direct path to this objective, according to the consultant’s analysis. It would bring the most safety improvements, raising the average risk index score at the crossings from the present level of 258,528 to 96,076.
“That option would ensure the greatest reduction in risk and its’ the most straightforward path to achieve quiet zone approval because it automatically qualifies for quiet zone status under FRA guidelines,” Chief Transportation official Philip Kamhi said.
While this option is being endorsed by staff, the Kimley-Horn study lists other alternatives that Palo Alto can pursue. It can opt to install quad gates at just two of the three crossings, which the analysis shows could be sufficient to lower the risk level to the needed threshold. The risk index under this option would be 178,092, the report states.
The city can also pursue other safety measures such as road adjustments, enhancements to sight visibility and improved signaling to achieve the needed threshold. That, however, would significantly complicate the process because the FRA would need to sign off on these improvements and then regularly review them to make sure they are working as intended.
“For the crossings in the Study Area, ASMs (alternative safety measures) may be useful if the City determines four-quadrant gates would not be feasible, specifically related to the limited clearance between the grade crossings and nearby intersections with Alma Street,” the Kimley-Horn report states. “However, it is important to note the risk associated with implementation of ASMs, due to the increased frequency of recertification (2.5 to 3 years) as well as the subjective evaluation of the safety measures.”
The last option on the table is the installation of wayside horns, which don’t exactly remove the noise but they localize it so that it’s not dispersed as widely and doesn’t sound as loud to the residents near the tracks. The report states that wayside horns can be used as an interim measure while the city is working on a larger project to create a quiet zone.
“The wayside horn would be placed on the warning device, and oriented to face the roadway,” the report states. “The sound would be directed down the roadway, which has the ability to reduce the overall spread of the noise. However, wayside horns are not the same as establishing a quiet zone.”
The Rail Committee agreed that wayside horns are well worth exploring. The three committee members – Chair Pat Burt and council members Ed Lauing and Julie Lythcott-Haims – also agreed that they need additional information, including cost estimates and the timeline for construction, before they could choose the city’s next steps. The committee directed transportation staff and consultants to continue exploring the installation of quad gates at all three crossings south of Palo Alto Avenue and wayside horns, which members agreed could be a useful interim measure.
While the quiet zone project is still in the early stages, committee members agreed that its impact could be significant, particularly given the city’s parallel effort to pursue grade separation at the Churchill, Meadow and Charleston crossings. The council has been debating options for grade separation – the redesign of the rail corridor so that tracks and streets would no longer intersect — for over a decade. Currently, the city’s preferred alternative for Churchill is an underpass for cars. At the Meadow and Charleston crossings, the city is evaluating two options: a car underpass and a “hybrid” design that combines raised tracks and lowered roads.
While those options are expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take well over a decade to construct, committee members agreed that quiet zones could serve as a valuable interim measure, particularly at a time when Caltrain is increasing its service levels during its transition to electric trains.
“It may be that wayside horns solve 90% of the problem and we don’t need to do the rest of that stuff,” Lythcott-Haims said.
She also suggested that the quiet zone project can “conceivably be an alternative to grade separation.”
“This is exciting and a massive switch in thinking, potentially,” she said.
