This is again extremely sad and yet nothing is done.

With all the talk about grade crossings and nothing agreed or being done, we are not thinking of this as an emergency situation. When will something safer get done at these crossings to prevent people getting onto the tracks?

The current setup seems sufficient to stop anyone from unintentionally getting on the tracks. Agree that it is very sad.

Sadly, almost all Caltrain deaths are pedestrians, and almost all of those deaths are intentional. So as seen with suicides on BART and on other completely “closed” rail systems like it around the world, Caltrain grade separations costing hundreds of millions of dollars cannot (and won’t) stop premeditated intentional deaths, as these can easily shift to nearby stations (as already sometimes occurs) or other means (e.g. a self-inflicted gunshot) to the same self-destructive ends.

While unfortunately far more difficult to solve, the real root problem to address is with depression and/or mental illness leading to suicidal ideation.

This is the 2nd time this year I was heading on Alma toward Oregon Expressway, and the intersection in front of the tracks were blocked with emergency vehicles. I could see there were no cars involved. How much would it cost the city to have a mental health professional standing watch, 2/47, at the crossing there? What is a life worth? A lot of people cross there -- on foot, bicycles, moms and dads with strollers... at noon on a weekday, I can't imagine how many people witnessed this. Who is paying for their PTSD? I think instead of having hindsight mental health professionals to try to undo the damage to family members and witnesses, it would be more proactive to have them preventing suicides at frequented locations. Someone chose to end their life today in a place where some of the most (arguably) brilliant minds sleep every night. None of them can figure out how to fix this.

@MyFeelz: Are you kidding? Churchill/Alma had a guard there for years and it was a complete waste of taxpayer money. One guard went and burglarized houses while on duty. The guards were told to call the Palo Alto police to report any suspicious activity, they couldn’t stop someone from standing on the tracks. No suicides occurred in the years that someone was there but they did occur at other train track intersections.

If indeed this most recent death is officially ruled a suicide, then that would be tragic. What's also tragic is that there will always be people who choose to end their lives.

But what's not tragic is that we CAN do things to make this less likely. One of those things is to execute on grade separation, which makes it more difficult for people to access the tracks.

I often hear, as I read above, sentiments like "these can easily shift to nearby stations ... or other means." I don't think that the reality is that simple.

What I hear and read from experts in the field is that putting barriers in place to make it harder for people to end their lives does indeed reduce the rate at which people will try. It doesn't ELIMINATE suicide, but it can make it less likely, and isn't that worth our effort?

For example, consider the study below, which looked at railroad crossings in Australia:

Web Link

and take a look the toolkit below from the FRA, which has lots of resources dedicated to grade crossing safety:

Web Link

I count at least 13 people who were killed at grade crossings in Palo Alto since 2000. Don't we want to take more action?

I didn't say "GUARD", Sheila. I said mental health professional. And there are guards when school is in but those are crossing guards. I don't expect a "guard" to be able to look at someone and psychically intuit that someone plans to jump. But I think mental health professionals are pretty adept.

And you do have one good point. We need professionals at all of the crossings.

Or maybe citizens can join hands all up and down the tracks holding hands singing Kumbaya. 24/7.

Death at the tracks again. Malcolm Harris, referring to student suicides while he was at Paly in his book "PALO ALTO, a History of California, Capitalism and the World" talks of the city as being "haunted" by suicide at the tracks. We've had a reprieve, but now we are reminded that tracks remain an "attractive nuisance" requiring special measures to keep people out of dangerous territory unless they are literally inaccessible.

Here's my gut response:

Put the tracks on a viaduct 20' above street level. Remove the ugly and redundant rails and gravel ballast, landscape the area below the viaduct. As a start, do this for Meadow and Charleston. Take a look at whether it wouldn't also be the best alternative for Churchill.

No need for guards or mental health professionals where cross streets and paths cross through the space below the viaduct. No need for an electronic surveillance system. No need for a barbed wire-topped fence the length of Alma through the city. No need to gaze at endless rails left and right while passing through the space under the viaduct.

No need either to engage in fruitless battles between people with differing views on the underlying causes of voluntary death by train in Palo Alto. Get the rails up, remove the menace that those who were here when suicides and deadly accidents were constantly in the news still sense just a little every time we cross from one side of Alma to the other.

@Greg: the Victoria, Australia paper you linked to merely and very narrowly concluded that RAILWAY suicides (not suicides by all causes) dropped 61% within a small 3,280-foot (1,000m) radius of a grade separation. Of course they did!

Caltrain stations and grade crossings are further apart than 3,280 feet … so this narrow study “conclusion” borders on laughably obvious and says nothing about reducing overall suicides or Caltrain suicides shifting to other crossings or stations. Note that people (such as the recent Stanford grad student or the Palo Alto doctor or the famous Burlingame jazz musician, etc., etc.) travel far in excess of 3,280 feet from their homes or offices or classrooms to deliberately step into the path of a train..

As with essentially all BART suicides, numerous Caltrain suicides have occurred at stations … and with grade seps, *premeditated* suicides will shift there or to other crossings or means.

Grade separations can only reduce spur-of-the-moment impulsive (unpremeditated) suicides and accidental deaths.

To illustrate just how rare they are, readers are challenged to cite & name even one or two truly accidental pedestrian deaths at any Caltrain crossing, let alone ones that occurred in Palo Alto.

I wish these stories contained at least a bit of information. It is news after all. We are so like afraid of offending that you have to read between the lines and guess and participate in gossip. So counterproductive.

About putting the train 20’ in the air, that is a terrible idea. Notice the person suggesting it is in Barron Park, safely away from the loud eyesore that would become. Picture the “el”elevated trains in Chicago. Clunk clunk squeeel day and night.

Living under capitalism is a lot better than under communism
Beware increasing centralization of political power
Beware authoritarians

Two similar issues within a couple of miles in less than 24 hours is disturbing.

People need to feel valued and society should be doing a better job of making everyone feel wanted. Too many divisive attitudes, name calling, finger pointing, blame and one upmanship is not helping. Working together to get on better together will be a start to making all people feel accepted and valued.

I'm arguing here that eliminating grade crossings will reduce or even eliminate one means to suicide in our town, and that will have an affect on the overall rate of suicide. To quote from the article I linked above:

"Restricting access to means is thought to be effective because it interrupts the suicidal process, giving the individual time to rethink their actions and/or allowing others to intervene..."

It is true, however, that it's not possible to find a reference to a pedestrian who was killed at a Palo Alto grade crossing accidentally, and it's hard to even imagine how such a thing could happen.

Cars, however, are a different story. At Charleston Road, on April 15, 2011, a woman was killed when she got her car stuck on the tracks as the gates came down. A driver was injured in 2016 at Meadow, and another driver was killed there on June 28, 2007.

Web Link
Web Link
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I don’t want my gut response above to be taken as my strongest argument why the viaduct option ought to be reexamined. It’s not.

Two years instead of four to completion, no need for shoo-fly tracks, minimal disruption to traffic on Alma, possibility of attractive landscaping instead of a raised hump of rails and gravel, reduced East-West separation of the community, competitive cost with more benefits than other options, quieter than expected, less invasive of privacy than feared—if these are supported through consultant studies and public discussion, the right decision should be clear. Taking care of the fatal “attractive nuisance” that the rails represent would be an important side benefit to a decision made on other grounds.

The trains have been here for 150+ years. When I was growing up, suicide by train was totally unheard of. It just never happened. I lost one Paly classmate at Alma and the tracks. It was an accident, not a suicide.

Intentional suicide on the tracks is a fairly recent thing. What has changed in recent years?

"Churchill/Alma had a guard there for years and it was a complete waste of taxpayer money. One guard went and burglarized houses while on duty."

The guards used to sit in their cars drinking Gatorade. How many suicides or attempts did these guards actually prevent or even report? Did anyone bother to keep records?

Putting a psychology Ph.D at every crossing doesn't strike me as realistic.

You can build a viaduct 1,000 feet in the air but at some point the trains have to come down to the ground so passengers can board them. I don't see a viaduct solving the problem.

If someone is h*ll bent on taking their life they'll find a way, train or no train.

:"Churchill/Alma had a guard there for years and it was a complete waste of taxpayer money. One guard went and burglarized houses while on duty."

The guards used to sit in their cars drinking Gatorade. How many suicides or attempts did these guards actually prevent or even report? Did anyone bother to keep records?"

As I recall, they put the guards in because they weren't satisfied with how the remote cameras were aimed and were being operate and the time to do anything about a potential suicide. They guards were unhappy because there were no bathrooms and I don't think anyone bothered to put in a Port-A-Potty. Then here were complaints about the guards not doing anything but it wasn't until long after a guard got caught burglarizing a nearby house that they went back to the cameras,

But, because the city had signed a multi-year contract with the guard company we were stuck paying for both the guards AND the people monitoring the remote cameras.

I forget how long the guard-vs-camera saga went on but it was a LONG and costly time.

A person can jump in front on an oncoming train in a split second, faster than it takes for a crossing guard to put down his bottle of Gatorade.

"People need to feel valued and society should be doing a better job of making everyone feel wanted. Too many divisive attitudes, name calling, finger pointing, blame and one upmanship is not helping. Working together to get on better together will be a start to making all people feel accepted and valued."

^ Sounds good in theory but not in practice. People will always have their differences and some are more adamant about it than others.

"^ Sounds good in theory but not in practice. People will always have their differences and some are more adamant about it than others."

All true but you've got to admit that the polarization and ensuing violence have gotten worse over the last few decades now with "leaders" spouting absurd and dangerous nonsense like "all democrats are Pedophiles" and "time to kill all Xs" before "they replace us."

Remember that Fox News was only launched in 1996. Lots of dark money and big media fueling this polarization.

People and historians who've explored the rise of Nazi Germany with its book banning, concentration camps, mass murder etc. are now equating the rise in authoritarianism to 1932 and asking what you / we are doing now to stop it because that what we're doing now shows what we would have been doing then to stop Hitler.

They also note that the book banning / book burning was only a first step and we're certainly there now.

I think hateful comments come from everywhere. I see people calling those they have disagreements with all sorts of hateful names.

But you are right about 24 hour news. CNN had Headline News which was around the world in 30 minutes and did a good job of telling what was going on nationally, internationally, in sport and at times locally. The other CNN channel went into more depth. Unfortunately CNN stopped Headline News and the main channel started making stars of their presenters. That was when their rot started. They were not trying to inform, they were looking to get viewing figures. Their presenters started earning huge amount of dollars and other cable channels started following suit. The way they tried to get their own viewers was by hitting on the other channels' presenters. They had their own agenda and instead of presenting news in an unbiased fashion, they started attempts at influence to their way of thinking.

When the broadcast channels had an early evening national roundup of news that lasted 30 minutes they had plenty of time to edit their main stories and had a 30 minute time slot to get the news across. When real time news started using the internet they just wanted to beat each other to be first out with the news. That's when the rot started and now it is impossible to find out exactly what is truth and what is opinion.

What do Fox News and CNN have to do with suicides on the Caltrain right of way?

@Greg: BART and other crossing-free closed systems like it around the world all still suffer suicides from easily-accessible station platforms (as Caltrain already sometimes does). Only systems with platform screen doors (like Honolulu’s just-opened all-viaduct driverless Skyrail system) are able to stop platform suicides. BART seems better able to keep news reports about their suicides very low key (they temporarily close the station for what they typically call “a medical emergency”):

Web Link

Web Link

Also, while it is impossible for vehicles to be hit at crossings without their drivers impatiently, imprudently, or ignorantly first violating one or more vehicle codes, we cannot assume all such crashes all accidental. Just as some drivers quite purposely drive off Hwy 1 cliffs, some deliberately put their vehicles into the path of oncoming trains.

@Leslie: suicide-by-train is not a new thing! Ask any old or retired train engineer. In decades past, Caltrain suffered over 20 in some years. Until these last two (probable) suicides in one day, there had only been 2 so far this year. Quite an improvement, actually … and with only 4 at mid-year, Caltrain is still “on track” for a possibly record low year.

Sorry, my characterization of the fence that keeps us from getting on the tracks that pass through the heart of the city is incorrect. On closer inspection I noticed that it's not topped with barbed wire. But the message it conveys is still clear, despite the effort to hide the fence behind foliage -- Danger!, Don't even think about being in this proscribed space. That could change with a viaduct.

"suicide-by-train is not a new thing! Ask any old or retired train engineer. In decades past, Caltrain suffered over 20 in some years."

I was thinking of the Southern Pacific era. A death on the tracks in Palo Alto would be invariably be covered in the Times and was quite infrequent in those days, certainly not 20 in a year, not like today.

I don't think a viaduct is a suicide panacea for the reason I described in a previous post.

Train suicides should not be the primary driving force behind modification of the ROW.

@Jerry, actually, Caltrain has been adding barbed wire to the tops of its right of way fencing in various areas as dictated by perceived need and funding. Examples are visible from Alma where it passes over Embarcadero.

Also, the correct name for Honolulu’s new all-viaduct rail system is “Skyline” … see YouTube for lots of recent videos as they just celebrated their long-awaited grand opening of Phase 1: Web Link

@Reality Check

Thanks for sharing the detail that barbed wire is used, just not uniformly, to keep people from accessing the tracks to harm themselves . When I looked at the picture I took at the Meadow crossing after the recent fatality and didn't see barbed wire on top of the fencing, I worried that I might have exaggerated the visual benefits of having the tracks inaccessibly high, up on a viaduct.