Keeping It Quiet In Montclair

The information is wrong. It's not about a 24/7 quiet zone. There is currently a quiet zone 7pm to 7am which is probably why people don't think 100 plus db whistles aren't so bad. That will expire. It's about making what is currently in place permanent. The plan also includes a 24 period on the weekend in anticipation of weekend service. The cost is a one time cost for a permanent quiet zone, unlike other town budget items like the school budget which right now is about 7mm+ over last year's.

This town has gotten excessively noisy the past several yers anyway: train or no train. There are some NYC streets that are quieter than here..

jerseygurl

The current 7am to 7pm "quiet zone" is an agreement between Montclair and NJT. According to the recent federal rules, this agreement can not continue after 2010, so there is no way to make the current system permanent. Montclair either has to follow federal rules to establish a 24/7 quiet zone or every train will blow its whistle 4 times at each grade crossing.

"Are there any economic disadvantages associated with excessive noise?"

I would caution the Rabbi to consult the train schedule when arranging a bris.

Spicoli - right, but that will expire this June if the town doesn't file by the deadline.

The train goes RIGHT past my house, blowing it's horn all the time. It's not loud, it doesn't bother me, and that's that. In fact, I like it! If someone starts complaining about it that's probably because they lead a boring life and need something to do. Maybe they can go hang out with the crybabies at the dog park and protest cell phone towers.

Katie - that's great. Perhaps it will bother you more when it starts at 5:30 in the morning and goes until 1:00 am? The whistles don't bother most people during the day, but once the quiet zone expires it might be a bit unnerving to hear whistles at the crack of dawn. It's also possible you won't notice, but some people might be bothered.

I live right next to the train. my place. driveway. train. The diesel train that goes by at 5:40am does sometimes blow a horn. You get used to the trains. correct me if im wrong, but wouldnt it be less than $250,000 per crossing if we just built foot bridges everywhere?!

and if we build teensy-tiny cars they can cross the footbridges too!

really, is it about cars that cross the tracks even when the gates are down? I would think it would only be a hazzard to pedestrians wanting to run across the tracks

Hey,

What's another million or two Ed?

Perhaps we can just bury the tracks and make NJTransit run as a subway through Montclair. That couldn't be too expensive, no?

ha! we can learn from Boston's "Big Dig". Anyway, with all the ties between NYC and Montclair, having weekend service should have been done a long time ago. Its not just about us going to manhattan on a saturday. This will bring people into montclair. (Ill tell ya it would be nice to see some new girls hop off that train for a night of montclair debauchery)

jerseygurl,
how close do you live to the tracks? my general take on this issue is the idea of trains=noisy=loud=bad gets pretty trumped up by folks who think the idea sounds just awful but don't really have any reason to be affected by it. I have yet to hear a coherent argument for why a town with six train stations needs to not have train whistles blowing at the cost of 1+ million dollars. Let's not forget that anytime someone says a public works project will cost about a million dollars, you can easily translate that into "well over a million dollars". Hell, Joe H wants to spend 30,000 just to have someone tell him which crossings get gates and which get channelization.
I live 2 houses from the tracks. If I never wanted to hear a train I wouldn't have moved there. I am, on the other hand, sick of paying out my nose in property taxes. So let's weigh the benefits before we all go crazy.
Statements like "how would you like to hear trains at 1 in the morning?" don't help either. First of all, in Montclair, you get 1 train an hour on average after 9 pm and they sure don't run all night (would be awesome if they did.)

I took a trip with my parents when I was a young teenager (early 70's), cross country, the big vacation. We drove, stopping to see all the sites. When we hit Kansas City at dusk, it was time for a stop. We found nothing but "NO VACANCY" signs (except for the one the old man came out of, red faced, mumbling not for us). We decided to have a nice dinner and then drive on until we were far enough out to find lodging.
50 miles and 11PM we found an out of the way "motel". It was great, my father loved the price and me and my mom loved the individual cabins. What we hadn't noticed in the dark, train tracks, maybe 20-25 feet behind the cabin, or the crossing 100 feet down the curved road.
3AM, dead tired, asleep, and the freight comes rumblin thru. You want "awesome" Drob? That first whistle blast was right next to the cabin, if that place still stands, there is still a shadow mark, with finger indents, of my Mom in that ceiling.

Close enough to hear the whistles. It's not the train noise. Right now no one hears 4 whistle blasts per crossing between 7pm and 7am because there are none. It's a quiet zone now. Same on the weekends, there are no trains yet. Westfield, like Montclair, has a train running through the center of town and has also applied for quiet zone status. The cost is a one time expense for a permanent quiet zone and it is a fraction of the town buget for just one year -- keep the BOE increase at the 4% annual cap instead of the current budget with a 7.2% increase and you'd have enough money to upgrade the crossings and some left over. That's just this year's BOE budget.

This (like most threads) is just plain crazy...we live 12 miles from a major urban center and can't easily access this via public transportation. I, too, live very near the tracks (you decide which side!) and am just now listening to the train passing thru enroute to Upper Montclair station...lovely bells ringing, etc. It's just part of the ambient noise that comes with living outside a bubble (sarcasm intended).
The train is the way to go for both environmental and economic reasons and, for many, having weekend service was part of the draw in moving to Montclair in the first place.
Save the bucks, it'll be a distant memory soon enough.
Specifically, to Y.A.Duck, when was the last time you saw/heard a freight train on this line? I completely understand having lived near enough at one point in my life (screeching wheels, speed are the worst) to experience that, but this is truly not the case here.

jerseygirl, I should have made clear in my post that it was not a comment for/against the issues here, just a story inspired on awesome and train whistles, I was just cruising away from the horror of the teen blog and ended up with a "funny" story here. That said, I also don't live far from the tracks, though not right next to them. I hear the whistles and bells clearly.
I have no objection to them; it is something you get used to, partly because it is on a regular schedule, and it ends up not intruding, even at 1AM. (The asterisks with loud car stereos or who blow their horns when picking-up someone are very annoying and would love it if they went away.) The safety aspect is no little consideration, even with upgraded gates, people just do stupid things around trains for some reason and that horn can be an important wake-up call. I am all for weekend service tomorrow and think the whistle ban is a complete waste of money for the town.

duck -- i posted before i read your story. got it. do you think perhaps you don't find the whistles intrusive at 1am or 5:30 am is because there is a current ban on the 4 long blasts? when that ends you'll have 4 long loud blasts at 8, 9, 10 pm and 1am and they'll start as early as 5:30. is it possible the whistles don't bother anyone know because there are none?
it's not about weekend service - do you remember when midtown direct first started? that's when the whistle madness started and it was bad enough that the town got a temporary reprieve. that's about to end. you should read the faq sheet - the trains will still blow once approaching each station, still blow in an emergency...

"the trains will still blow once approaching each station, still blow in an emergency..."

$2,000,000 to reduce the number of whistles blown from 4 times to 1 time.

Seems like a perfectly good spend on my tax dollar.

This town is on crack. Good riddance Montclair. Maybe I'll come back when it's a ghost town.