San Mateo residents fed up with rail crossing noise pollution
Residents in one San Mateo neighborhood are sick and tired of hearing train horns at the crossing on Bellevue Avenue.
For Peter Martin, a longtime San Mateo resident, train noise is more than a nuisance. It's a quality of life issue - and he's ready for a solution.
"On a scale of 1-10, with 1 not being offensive at all and 10 being just really difficult, that was about a 4," he said, after a train passed by.
He's a qualified judge. He lives a little less than half a football field away from the E. Bellevue Ave. train crossing.
"I have since 1992, so 32 years," he said.
Now, the City of San Mateo is about as close as it ever has been to finding a solution to the problem by implementing safety improvements to numerous crossings - with a goal of creating a quiet zone to reduce train horn noise.
"Nobody suffers from train noise more than we do," he said.
But what to do at Martin's crossing remains the million dollar question. City staff proposed extending the center traffic median on both sides of the crossing. However, Martin says that idea won't work well for several reasons, one being traffic.
"Where it would come out to and we'd lose all the parking on both sides," he said.
But the other and more important one, in his eyes? He doesn't think the median would adequately improve safety.
"This could be one of the most dangerous crossings in the whole Peninsula if not even beyond that," Martin said. "So, to not consider putting in quad gates here, I can't fathom that."
He and other neighbors expressed their concerns about that proposal to city leaders at a recent meeting, and it paid off. So city leaders proposed a temporary closure of the Bellevue crossing, similar to the planned closure of the nearby Villa Terrace crossing. Martin says that idea would literally divide their neighborhood, which doesn't sit well with him either.
"It would make our neighborhood on one hand, quieter, but also it would feel a little bit sterile," he said.
Addressing the issue has been a long process. Kevin Simpson, another longtime resident, doesn't live as close to the tracks, but he's watched the city try to tackle it for quite some time.
"We're down to the final work that needs to be done to make the train quiet zone possible," he said. "I just don't want to see us talking about this in another year. We should be fully in implementation mode."
He thinks closing the Bellevue crossing is a fair compromise.
"It also is probably pretty cost-effective," he said.
But he says safety should drive the decision.
"It's a safety issue. If we can improve the safety at these five crossings, a benefit - a real side benefit - is that we also get to reduce the train noise," he said. "Now is the time to get the safety improvements done and also reduce the horn noise."
Martin's preference would be quad gates at the crossing, so no cars or pedestrians could get through when a train comes by.
"That's the best solution," he said.
However, that would cost the city more money than closing the crossing altogether. So if the city maintains momentum on solving the issue, he says he's on board with the closure over the median.
"There's no perfect solution," he said. "If it comes down to the choice of this being unsafe versus closing it, then close it and we keep our parking."