UPDATE: 8:25 a.m. – Blue Line is resuming normal operations with some residual delays. Thank you for your patience and understanding throughout this incident.
Blue Line service in downtown Long Beach is disrupted due to a train versus auto incident near Pacific Coast Highway Station. The accident happened at 7:04 a.m. at Long Beach Boulevard and 14th Street.
There is limited train service between Downtown Long Beach and Anaheim stations. Service between downtown Los Angeles and Willow stations is not impacted.
Long Beach Transit Line 51 will be honoring Metro fares. The 51 bus serves downtown Long Beach and connects with the Blue Line’s Willow and Artesia stations. Map:
For real-time service alerts, follow us on @metrolosangeles or @metroLAalerts on Twitter.
Categories: Service Alerts
The Green Line was supposed to be driverless but for some reason the idea was scraped.
Oh boy… another track incursion by a vehicle. I’m really questioning the utility of having light rail run within streets as opposed to it’s own dedicated right-of-way. It may be more suitable in less dense cities, but not in LA county. I think Metro really needs to consider grade separation as much as possible on all current and future light rail lines. Yes it’s more expensive upfront, but what is the long-term cost/benefit if our LRT lines could provide more frequent and faster service, with fewer interruptions due to accidents, yielding higher ridership than otherwise. Additionally, full-grade separation would allow the procurement of automatic driverless trains therefore reducing operational costs.
I believe the Vancouver SkyTrain did an analysis that showed that although their light metro (SkyTrain) fully grade-separated driverless technology had higher capital costs than a light rail option, over the long-run operational costs were lower and the SkyTrain option had higher ridership projections due to the higher frequency of trains running coupled with the decreased travel time due to full-grade separation (increased speed).
Perhaps in the future Measure R2, some funding can be put towards grade-separating segments along the Gold, Blue, and Expo lines where it will improve safety and speed.