The Muni system in San Francisco was the scene of a collision at 2:30 PM Calfornia time, with 47 people injured, 20 of them seriously
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/18/MN3C18RJGG.DTL
Some background – because of its geography and dense population, San Francisco was one of the last major cities to have a substantial streetcar system. They used the PCC type streetcars that were invented just before World War two, and deployed widely after the war was over. Most of the lines ran on the very wide Market Street and looped at the Montgomery Station. Prior to BART, the Oakland Bay Bridge had a streetcar line that ran across the bridge.
When BART was being designed, the decision was made to take the streetcars off Market Street and bury them in a tunnel, and the BART line in the tunnel a level below the streetcars. The streetcars were replaced with more modern LRV cars. (Interestingly, the PCC cars were brought back to Market Street as the “F” line as a heritage line, and has been wildly successful). Being a transit geek, I’ve travelled to San Francisco several times just to ride BART and the PCC cars.
Here is some home movies of what Market Street was like when it was filled with Streetcars, Trolley buses, Diesel Buses and cars.
With the large number of trains running during the weekday, and the small lead times, MUNI decided to install automatic train operation systems from the Canadian company Altacel to allow the computers to control the operations in the tunnel, allowing 48 to 60 trains per hour instead of the 23 when done by human operators. Once the cars emerge from the tunnel, they run on city streets among cars, so need human operations.
The first few weeks of the MUNI operation were a totally disaster, with cars refusing to move, frustrated operators trying to override the system, and passengers fuming. Eventually, the bugs were worked out and it has operated pretty flawlessly since then – until today.
The reports indicate that one moving train rear-ended a stopped train at high speed. The driver of the moving train is one of the most seriously injured. It’s worth noting that this happened on Saturday afternoon, when trains would be few and far between and operating with large headways. The accident occured at the West Portal of the tunnel under Twin Peaks That’s the point at which the Train Protection ends and street running begins. Muni System Map
The Twin Peaks Tunnel is 2.27 miles long… plenty of time for a driver to be distracted and not watching the space in from of them since there is nothing to do in the tunnel for maybe 3 minutes and in the tunnel the train is still under automated control, and on a Saturday it’s not like there might be train right in front of them.
A blogger in San Francisco caught the damaged train being hauled away Pictures Here
Video of the general area of the crash is on Myspace here. The accident happened outside the tunnel underneath the roofed in area.
There was a similar accident in June 2008, when a Muni train hit the train in front going 17 mph, in a 3 mph zone. Accident Account
In August 2008, a Muni driver rammed the historic streetcar on Market Street, an hour after being warned she was following the streetcar in front too closely. Story
Early reports (usually wrong) suggest the driver of the moving train gestured that he wasn’t able to stop the train, or fainted, or the train in front of him stopped unexpectedly
Maybe President Obama should propose a Smarter Public Transit System.
Tags: Accident, BART, Computer Automation, Muni, Operator Distraction, Public Transit, San Franciso
The NTSB is already releasing details, which is interesting. The trains have full time video recording what is going on. The train operator has worked for MUNI since 1979 (which means he is in his 50s at least), but only drove an LRV since 2007. He turned off the automatic train control inside the tunnel, 22 seconds before he arrived at the West Portal Station. He didn’t engage the Mushroom, the big red emergency stop button. The collision occurred at about 22 mph.
Latest version of the story is the driver says he “blacked out”. The driver is an African American at least in his 50s, and weighs probably 400 pounds based on the video.
His story doesn’t add up. All “trains” (including MUNI) have what is called a “deadman switch” for exactly this reason. The controls require positive pressure from the operator to deal with the situation where the driver passes out or dies while the train is in motion. When the driver loses consciousness, they let go of the control, the deadman switch kicks in and the train immediately goes into emergency stop.
Given 3 similar accidents in a year where the Muni driver rammed the trolley/LRV in front of them for no apparent reason in daylight with clear weather – but at a speed slow enough that it won’t cause death, my skeptical sense is started to suspect these are not accidents at all, but MUNI employees setting themselves up for permanant disability and/or passengers placed on the train deliberately with the intent of filing lawsuits. Just last week, MUNI bought a new $25 million liability policy.
If it isn’t malice, here’s another theory. The witness (there is a woman passenger who talked to the TV reporter who saw the whole thing)… She says he slumped over the controls. Perhaps given his large size, his body weight pushed the controller forward causing the train to accelerate – he apparently had stopped at the end of the tunnel, and put the train into manual just to pull it into the station. The tunnel runs uphill, so to have gone from zero to 22 mph in a short space suggests the train was accelerating rapidly prior to the crash. The “whether he got permission” is pretty irrelevant. The union says it is ordinary practice to go into manual to pull a second train up to the platform, which makes all the sense in the world – the Skokie Swift in Chicago which I road for a year does exactly the same thing.
The Breda controller, from what I’ve read relies only on the operator applying forward pressure, not something more definitive like holding in a button on the controller (which would cause fatigue very fast).