Note: The content of this post was missing for a little while. I don’t know why. I guess it’s one of those things that happen to blogs. Sorry for the inconven … the inconvenie … the problem.
Our city’s so-called “alternative” newspaper, The Examiner, is this week examining trains blocking our local intersections for long chunks of time.
All of the streets routinely bottlenecked by trains are east-west routes which link the rest of Beaumont (Texas) with downtown. I have to drive on these streets almost every day for work or other reasons. I also go walking daily beside the switching yard which is the hub of all this railroad action.
It can be annoying having to sit and wait for as many as 30 minutes for rail cars to do whatever it they are supposed to do.
The Examiner talked to our mayor and city manager who say they plan to dust off a state law and a seldom-used city ordinance which prohibits trains from blocking intersections for more than 10 minutes in the case of the state law and half that for the city one. I mention dusting because the police haven’t written a citation for trains blocking the streets since 2004. A grand total of two tickets have been written during the past 10 years.
Obviously, if you absolutely, positively have to be somewhere at a certain time, the trains sitting there as you are sitting there can be quite frustrating. If the trains are extremely long ones, such as those full of military cargo headed to or from the Port of Beaumont, one has a choice of two ways to get around the trains. One is to head south on Martin Luther King Boulevard for two miles or so to the rail overpass at the College Street-MLK interchange. The other option to drive almost a mile north on MLK to Interstate 10. Either way will cost you time you don’t really have.
Although I would guess infrastructure and workload plays some part in the reasons these trains get stacked up, the public frustration has merit. And while I applaud the city government for wanting to do something, I don’t know if writing tickets will cause the desired impact.
The fines are, according to The Examiner, are between $100 and $300. If fines from such tickets, come out of corporate pockets, what would one want to bet that the railroads would just as soon take the ticket and pay the fine? Whether there are some steeper fines for successive offenses, I don’t know. My guess would be no. So we are stuck back at square one.
Perhaps the fact that the city will encourage citizens to report train violations and instruct police to write tickets (I’m sure officers have a little discretion) after 10 years of virtual inaction could be seen as a start.
If people are serious about something being done about this problem then they, we, I, should hold the city’s feet to the fire. Hey, I’m being figurative here. The last thing I need is for some nut to actually hold city officials’ feet to the fire because “that guy on the eight feet deep (again with the feet) said so.” If increased citations don’t reasonably improve the situation then the council needs to see what they can do about it. Hopefully, if additional steps are necessary the city and the railroad should arrive at some kind of compromise.
We need our railroads and we need access between downtown and the rest of Beaumont. And something needs to happen fairly quick because like someone once said: “Time is moolah” or something trite like that.