RR crossings are a growing concern in PF

POST FALLS — Fred Swanson has watched drivers on Chase Road flip a U-turn when a train is approaching and race to other intersections hoping to cross rather than wait.

The retired Idaho State Police investigator, who lives in the Prairie Meadows subdivision, believes the risky behavior will only intensify when more planned subdivisions are built on the Rathdrum Prairie north of the tracks.

"Our concern is the denseness of the housing going in out here," Swanson said. "There's already enough issues with railroad crossing fatalities with the existing amount of traffic.

"These aren't short trains coming through. I've seen people wait for 30 minutes while maintenance is being performed, traffic gets backed way up and people get impatient."

Bobby Wilhelm, who lives off Chase in the Meadows subdivision, said he has also watched the bottlenecks and abrupt U-turns. He said multiple subdivisions with about 200 total lots are in various stages of the approval process in the vicinity of his home.

"There are safety issues and stacking of cars because of the bottlenecks on Grange and Chase," Wilhelm said. "I've lived here all my life and have known people killed by those trains. When will this be taken seriously?"

Wilhelm started a limited liability corporation called Citizens for the Protection of the Prairie for a unified voice to express railroad safety concerns.

The group's first stop will be at today's Post Falls Planning and Zoning Commission public hearing at 6 p.m. on a 20.8-acre annexation request north of Staples and west of Chase for a single-family residential project.

Wilhelm, who is a real estate agent, said he understands that growth will continue and that can be healthy for the area. But he also hopes decisionmakers will keep an eye on density in the name of railroad safety and as the building in the city core connects with larger lots on the prairie.

"We're not trying to stop growth, but we want reasonable decisions based on safety and traffic factors that affect all of us," he said.

Chris Clark, a design engineer representing property owners Mark Robertson and Willamette Valley Real Property, LLC, on Monday said the lot sizes and theme of the Staples Acres/Boseth project are still in flux.

"There's a lot of different ideas, but nothing is set in stone," Clark said. "We're trying to get the property into the city first, then we'll work on the interior design. There's also a project being built just to the south so we're seeing how that project will turn out. Development in Post Falls is so crazy that we want to see what the biggest demand is."

When asked about residents' concerns about railroad safety in the area, Clark said making further improvements at the crossings is possible with development.

"Everything is possible," he said. "We just haven't reached any of those conversations yet."

But Wilhelm, Swanson and other residents said the only real remedy to limiting the traffic bottlenecks is watching the density of the projects.

"There's going to be in-fill development — that's fine and inevitable," said Larry Castor, secretary of the Meadows Homeowners Association. "What concerns us is the high-density housing. We don't want Grange to become a thoroughfare when it was not designed to be that way."

The latest railroad crossing fatality in Post Falls occurred in February at an intersection just east of Chase involving two Post Falls High students. The female passenger died, while the male driver was injured.

Travis Campbell, who runs a vehicle-train collision program called Operation Lifesaver that offers presentations, said Kootenai County often leads the state with such accidents.

Campbell said as a leader of a nonprofit, he refrains from getting involved in political issues but added "the possibility of more trains and motorists interacting is certainly a good concern to have."

"There's more than 14,000 crossings in the state of Idaho and, if it was up to me, all of them would have gates and lights but that's just not feasible," he said. That's why other precautions such as education need to be made, he added.

Wilhelm said while growth can have a lot of positives, possible consequences can also be overlooked.

"Nobody pays attention until someone else is dead," he said.