How is this stupid? Its a gate. you push on it and it opens. If its like the ones on the gold line up in Pasadena there isn’t even a latch just push on through it.

Ideally the gate should break someones concentration and force them to look up from their phone that they are texting on while walking and look to see it the train is coming.

Stupid is being a belligerent idiot and walking into traffic to avoid pushing open a gate.

LOL! if someone walks into traffic and gets hit, that is not the fault of some government pencil pusher.

why won’t the gubbmint do something!!!??!?1

“but in reality they made the situation more unsafe because it’s too much of a pain in the ass”

I’m sorry, how is it too much of a pain? I’ve never used one of these before, but from the descriptions given I don’t really see what the problem is.

By the way, who WALKS in LA ?

such a inconvenience to take 10 extra seconds and push a gate open. slow news day huh?

I agree that if someone gets hit by a car because they’re inconvenienced by this they’re a complete and total idiot.

But these are the same people who this crap was installed to protect in the first place, at a cost of thousands of dollars to taxpayers all for the sake of, as Sean say, governmental ass covering.

And thanks to Jimmy for considering Metblogs to be a news site.

I had a case like this once – someone was injured because there was no gate or other “safety” precaution in front of some (rather obvious) train tracks, and they quite literally walked into the train. The county lost because it failed to put up adequate notice of the hazard it created.

Granted, there is a considerable amount of contributory negligence/idiocy on the injured party’s part (after all, you probably should be looking both ways when walking across any crosswalk in LA), but the gate is up for the simple reason that people will think of any reason to blame the state/county/city for their stupidity. So, yes, the point of the gate is so that the government can submit that they did everything they could to deter people from walking into a moving train. The money it cost to put this up is far, far less than the cost of going to court.

In Miami we have , at almost every corner where there is a sidewalk, a bumpy mat meant for people with wheelchairs. It’s is extremely dangerous for skaters like myself – these hazards could wind up putting people IN wheelchairs.

United Nanny States of America

Well said Sean.

Point of clarification: There WAS an mechanized gate here like the ones that come down in front of cars at the crossings, like the one 100 feet from here at the next crossing, like the ones at every South Pasadena crossing. They replaced them with these pull gates, because, well, litigious safety comes first.

It’s not like I step into the path of oncoming cars, but given the choice, I’m not going to grab the H1N1-coated gates when I can simply step off the curb. To put it in a car-centric perspective, think of them as speed bumps: Do we want to drive over speed bumps head on, or given the opportunity, will we swerve around them if possible? I swerve.