Tensions run high as Mountain View residents share pain of living next to loud VTA bells

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A community meeting threatened to go off the rails several times last week, as residents living near Whisman Station implored the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) to put an end to the incessant ringing of bells and horns in their neighborhood.

“Every time a train goes by, it’s like a nuclear attack,” said one resident, addressing a panel of VTA officials at the German International School campus in Mountain View on Thursday, March 28.

The meeting was co-hosted by the city as an attempt to give community members and the VTA an opportunity to find some common ground. A few years ago, VTA upgraded its train bells to a higher pitch and added more horns to the rail-crossings between Middlefield Road and Central Expressway.

Since then, the Whisman Station community has been besieged by a constant bombardment of noise broadcasting the arrival and departure of trains that run from a little past 5 a.m. through midnight, nearly every day of the week.

About 50 residents showed up at the meeting to ask VTA to turn the tracks by Whisman Station into a quiet zone, where bells are not regularly sounded. But their hopes were dashed when officials said their hands were tied by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

The CPUC stipulates the volume level of VTA bells, which is set at 75 decibels to be heard 100 feet away from the front of trains. It also requires that VTA sound bells when entering and leaving stations and at every crossing.

Perhaps most critically though, the CPUC does not have a process in place to create quiet zones in residential neighborhoods — unlike the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), which regulates heavy rail operations.

“Long story short, Mountain View does not qualify for a quiet zone,” said Susan Lucero, VTA Deputy Director of Safety and Compliance. “The quiet zone process is an FRA process. We are compliant with CPUC regulations, and CPUC does not have a quiet zone process,” she said.

Light rail tracks that are adjacent to heavy rail tracks, like Caltrain, can fall under FRA jurisdiction and qualify for consideration as a quiet zone, according to the VTA. But the tracks by Whisman Station miss the mark.

“The heavy rail track would have to run parallel with our system. So, since there’s a split at that point (by Central Expressway), then our corridor continuing through Whisman Station is not regulated by the FRA,” said Antonio Tovar, VTA Transit Systems Safety Supervisor.

The news provoked frustration from community members. “The real problem we got is we have no rights. You guys can do whatever you want to us and that’s what you’re doing. We have no rights,” said Mike Wilkes, a Whisman Station resident.

Eileen Goodwin, a consultant who was hired by the city to facilitate the meeting, had little success moving the discussion forward, and when she criticized the audience, it nearly derailed the entire proceedings.

“We can just stop with all this, you can yell at us until it’s time to go, but it’s not going to get you the answers we need to get you. I’m sorry that this group is really off the chain. I don’t know if it’s post-COVID or what,” Goodwin said.

The comment outraged residents who in turn said Goodwin was not acting like a neutral party or treating them with respect. Goodwin then announced that she was leaving, which prompted some people to jeer, while others expressed dismay.

An older man stood up to admonish the crowd, asking them to listen to the officials in the room and recognize that nothing would be decided that evening. “That’s just quite disrespectful that somebody’s going to leave here. That isn’t how we should be operating,” he said.

Subdued by the comments, the audience settled down, and Dawn Cameron, Mountain View’s acting assistant city manager and community development Director, stepped in to provide new direction. “Obviously, that didn’t go well, and so we’re going to do a bit of a reset here,” she said.

With Cameron at the helm, the community started to chip away at the edges of their main concern: how to get VTA to damper its bells.

Jennifer Delaney, a Whisman Station resident, addressed the three city council members sitting in the audience. “How can we partner together on this so that there can be a larger voice?” she asked Margaret Abe-Koga, Alison Hicks and Emily Ann Ramos. The question received support from other residents who also pressed the council to engage with the CPUC to make changes.

Abe-Koga, who is an ex-officio member of the VTA board of directors, leveled with the community, stating that there was little chance the CPUC would listen to the city. “I don’t want you all to feel like tomorrow this is going to happen. We can work on it. It may take years, but that’s where I think VTA is trying to come up with some more immediate solutions,” she said.

VTA had already proposed to standardize its bells to 75 decibels, whereas before some crossings were sounding “high bells” at 85 decibels. The agency also said it was modifying train bells on a new fleet that, while still set at 75 decibels, would sound less strident.

With the community’s input, VTA agreed to address the issue of banging pedestrian gates, and said it would look into allegations of train operators who were sounding bells too loudly and too long at the station and crossings.

The city also asked VTA to look into its ridership numbers and to consider reducing some of its service hours when numbers were low, like late in the evenings, thereby reducing the need to sound bells.

Several residents noted these modifications were incremental, and not the systemic changes they were looking for that would bring the peace of a quiet zone. For these reasons, some residents questioned whether their efforts would be better spent not advocating to change CPUC regulations but shutting down the VTA line entirely and turning it into a bicycle path.

The VTA representatives did not weigh in on this scenario. But in a roundabout way, they offered some encouragement to the community to rally and advocate for change.

“We have a better knowledge of how CPUC works, but we don’t have a bigger, stronger bandwidth than you as a public. We’re actually mandated by them. They are the headmaster or teacher in a school that uses a stick on us,” said Nauni Singh, VTA Deputy Director of Transit Operations.

“Then let’s complement our voices,” a community member responded.

“Absolutely,” Singh said.