Accident Prevention

In a sting aimed at curbing accidents along the Blue Line, police and sheriff's deputies staked out a two-mile stretch of the line's tracks in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday and ticketed nearly 300 jaywalkers and drivers they caught using cellphones and making illegal left turns. Transportation officials said the crackdown was the latest effort in a push to improve safety along the Blue Line, the city's oldest and most popular light rail line but also its most dangerous. Ninety-nine people have died in accidents and suicides involving the line in the nearly 20 years since the service from Los Angeles to Long Beach began.

At this year's L.A. Auto Show, carmakers are highlighting safety features that focus on preventing accidents rather than merely surviving them. Warning indicators for blind spots and rearview cameras have become common, but many manufacturers are taking the technologies a step further. The additional features act on the safety warnings when a driver fails to do so, said Jeremy Anwyl, chief executive of online auto research firm Edmunds Inc. "I think they are too easy to ignore," he said of the warnings.

Gary and Bimmy Keene of Mission Viejo love to swim. But wary of the risk of drowning or injury for their three toddlers, the Keenes made a decision this summer to get rid of their back-yard pool. After two weeks of work, the Keenes said Friday that they hope to have their swimming pool completedly filled with gravel and dirt by the end of this weekend. "We'd been thinking about doing something with the pool for some time," said Bimmy Keene, 35, a private-practice nurse.

In a sting aimed at curbing accidents along the Blue Line, police and sheriff's deputies staked out a two-mile stretch of the line's tracks in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday and ticketed nearly 300 jaywalkers and drivers they caught using cellphones and making illegal left turns. Transportation officials said the crackdown was the latest effort in a push to improve safety along the Blue Line, the city's oldest and most popular light rail line but also its most dangerous. Ninety-nine people have died in accidents and suicides involving the line in the nearly 20 years since the service from Los Angeles to Long Beach began.

Federal safety officials called for railroads to install cameras and voice recorders in every locomotive cab in the nation as they publicly warned Thursday that cellphone texting by engineers and conductors was a growing and lethal danger. The call came as members of the National Transportation Safety Board publicly concluded their investigation into the deadly collision of a commuter train and a freight train in Chatsworth in 2008 -- a crash they blamed on a Metrolink engineer who passed a stop signal as he sent a message from his phone.

About the Project This is the result of six months of research and reporting by Tribune Auto Race Writer Ed Hinton, with help from staffers at other Tribune papers, among them Darin Esper of the Los Angeles Times. It sheds new light on the decline of traditional fatalism among race drivers and the need for more research and action to prevent the violent deaths the sport has come to accept.

Drowsy after a long day and a few beers, Brandon Silveria said, his eyes closed for a second or two as he drove home from a high school party. His next memory came 18 months later at a rehabilitation facility. Silveria, 24, now tours the country sharing his story with teen-agers, encouraging them to be smarter than he was 7 1/2 years ago when the combination of alcohol and fatigue caused him to lose control of his car and slam into a tree.

Disneyland is placing safety warning signs on ride cars throughout the park in the aftermath of the September accident on Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin that left a 4 1/2-year-old Los Angeles County boy with severe brain damage, state officials said Friday. The park installed new cautionary signs Thursday night on Alice in Wonderland cars, hours after a 15-year-old boy from Mesa, Ariz., broke his foot and leg on the attraction.

In a bid to cut the number of near-collisions, counselors from the Federal Aviation Administration will hold a Project START (Safe Terminal Area Route Training) seminar for area pilots Aug. 2 at the Los Alamitos Armed Forces Reserve Center. Recent government reports have listed the Orange-Los Angeles counties' skies as having the worst near-collision rate in the country.

She is an elegant, composed blond woman in her mid-50s, slim, fashionably dressed. This morning, she's sitting in a modest stucco house in the high desert. The meeting place is not her home; she won't reveal where she lives. That's because Dr. Lorraine Day, the former chief of orthopedic surgery at San Francisco General Hospital, is at the center of some of the most emotionally charged issues of the AIDS epidemic: the rights and risks of patient and physician in the face of the virus called HIV.

Federal safety officials called for railroads to install cameras and voice recorders in every locomotive cab in the nation as they publicly warned Thursday that cellphone texting by engineers and conductors was a growing and lethal danger. The call came as members of the National Transportation Safety Board publicly concluded their investigation into the deadly collision of a commuter train and a freight train in Chatsworth in 2008 -- a crash they blamed on a Metrolink engineer who passed a stop signal as he sent a message from his phone.

Federal railroad officials Tuesday unveiled regulations for equipping the nation's freight and passenger trains with automated braking systems required by Congress after the deadly 2008 Metrolink crash in Chatsworth. "We believe this final rule, as mandated by Congress, is a giant step toward ensuring the safety and reliability of our freight, commuter and intercity passenger rail routes," said Joseph Szabo, administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration. The rules will regulate the design and installation of positive train control technology that must be implemented on all freight and passenger railroads by December 2015.

Nearly five years after a deadly Metrolink train wreck in Glendale intensified debate about passenger car design, Southern California's commuter rail service will soon take delivery of new high-tech, crash-resistant cars, officials announced Thursday. Two of the new-generation cars, the first of their kind in the nation, are to be unloaded from a ship in the Port of Long Beach in mid-January and will be put into service as early as next summer, agency officials said in a news conference at a Metrolink maintenance yard northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

More than a decade ago, Metrolink and other commuter rail services throughout California sought and received permission to bypass a federal requirement to install simple safety signs intended to help avoid accidents like last year's Chatsworth disaster. The action was disclosed this week in a technical and financial analysis of high-tech train collision avoidance systems prepared by the staff of the state Public Utilities Commission, which shares some oversight responsibilities for commuter rail systems.

As the anniversary of the Sept. 12 Chatsworth train disaster approaches, officials with Southern California's sprawling commuter rail service are facing a vexing array of technical, financial and potential legal challenges as they struggle to deliver on pledges of trailblazing safety reforms. A burst of energy to remake the region's Metrolink train operation was unleashed by the deadliest rail collision in modern California history, a watershed event that killed 25, injured 130 and prompted landmark federal mandates to modernize the nation's rail safety systems.

Stephen Owings, whose 22-year-old son died when his car was rear-ended, is fighting to have the federal government require the use of speed-limiting devices on all big rigs, saying: "We're not against truckers; we're pro-highway safety." Most often, citizen-crusaders find themselves in lonely, unequal struggles against industry groups and lobbyists. But this time, David and Goliath seem to be on the same side. Owings has drawn support from the American Trucking Assns.

While traffic officials applaud a new law that makes it illegal for drivers to read, write or send text messages, they admit there is little evidence that last year's ban against talking on a hand-held cellphone has actually prevented accidents. Since holding a phone to your ear was made a traffic violation last July, the California Highway Patrol has written about 48,000 tickets, fining drivers from $20 to $50.

The downtown car-trolley collision Wednesday that left two men injured came at a time of decreasing accidents on the line and does not point to a need for more safeguards, according to trolley officials. The accident was probably unavoidable and the operator remains in good standing with an excellent record, according to Pete Tereschuck, manager of transportation for San Diego Trolley.

An alarm that would warn pilots earlier of dangerously slow aircraft speed could have helped prevent a plane crash that killed 50 people in February, safety officials told an investigative panel Thursday. National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersman raised the idea on the third and final day of a hearing into the crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407, which went down near Buffalo, N.Y., killing all 49 people aboard and one person on the ground.

While traffic officials applaud a new law that makes it illegal for drivers to read, write or send text messages, they admit there is little evidence that last year's ban against talking on a hand-held cellphone has actually prevented accidents. Since holding a phone to your ear was made a traffic violation last July, the California Highway Patrol has written about 48,000 tickets, fining drivers from $20 to $50.