BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Parents at Gunn High School are calling on the city of Palo Alto to restrict access to the Caltrain tracks after the second death of a student this year.
“Our burden is the tracks. That is our fully accessible means, as we have been reminded of on average once a month this year alone,” mother Arlina Ahluwalia told Palo Alto City Council on Monday.
Ahluwalia said her sons were 2 and 4 years old when they lost someone they considered to be a big brother to a suicide on the tracks. They’re 13 and 15 now, and access to the tracks remains.
Ahluwalia said the west side of the tracks should be fenced off like the east side, and the city should dedicate a city employee to pursue federal funding for track safety.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association have all declared a national emergency regarding youth mental health, with suicide as the second leading cause of death among teens, Ahluwalia said.
Mother Debbie Mukumal said Palo Alto should start having people watch the tracks like they did after a series of suicides in 2009.
At the time, parents and volunteers sat by the tracks in shifts until the last train at 1 a.m. The guerrilla effort led council to hire security guards to watch the crossings for 24 hours a day.
In 2018, the city spent $1.5 million on an electronic detection system that replaced security guards with cameras and thermal sensors that alert police when people are on the tracks.
The city spends about $300,000 a year to monitor and maintain the detection system but won’t provide details about its performance, such as how often the system is activated and what the police response is.
“We can’t afford to wait to address this crisis one more day,” Mukumal told council. “Get the track watchers back online now, until a permanent solution can be adopted.”
Difficult conversations
Jaime Shpall, the mother of two sophomores at Gunn High School, said she started the first day of school on Aug. 14 by having a difficult conversation with her twins.
Shpall told her children that one of their friends, who they got to know during a spring production of the musical “Hadestown,” had took their lives.
Emily Fiedel, 17, was struck by a Caltrain on Aug. 9, according to the Santa clara County Medical Examiner. It was the seventh death on the tracks this year.
“Please take some sort of action to take that one lethal way away from these kids. Give them a chance,” Shpall told council.
Palo Alto Councilman Pat Burt, who is also on the Caltrain board, said yesterday that Caltrain, VTA and the city are working on a series of safety improvements – new technologies that can be installed in the coming months.
Improvements in the works
Churchill Avenue has been a pilot location for safety improvements.
Rail Sentry, a system that uses cameras, LiDAR and AI, was installed a few months ago to stop trains when someone walks onto the tracks.
Caltrain is also looking at installing trespasser panels with soft rubber cones about six inches tall that collapse when someone tries to walk across them.
“It’s a very clever, pretty new technology,” Burt said, calling the panels “cattle guards for people.”
Burt said he’s in discussions with VTA and Caltrain to get funding for Rail Sentry and trespasser panels at the East Meadow Drive and Charleston Road crossings in south Palo Alto.
Burt said the new technology can be installed at 1% of the cost of separating the tracks from the road through major construction projects.
Deaths at high
Caltrain reported 10 deaths on the tracks in 2022, 15 deaths in 2023 and 19 deaths last year — the most since 2015.
Gunn student Anriya Wang, 16, died on Feb. 20, 2024, and Paly student Ash He, 15, died on March 4.
Both deaths led to a period of mourning and grief at the Palo Alto Unified School District.
“Let us honor our lost student by taking care of ourselves and each other.
Let us remember that in both and joy and sorrow, we are one community,” board member Shana Segal said at a meeting in March.
Changes to tracks
The city and a contractor are designing underpasses to separate the tracks from the road at Churchill Avenue, East Meadow Drive and Charleston Road.
Council’s Rail Committee will discuss design options and alternatives on Sept. 16.
The city will have community meetings for Churchill Avenue on Sept. 30 and for the southern Palo Alto crossings on Oct. 1.
The meetings are to check in with residents as the design reaches 15%, and before the next milestone at 35%.
The underpass projects, called grade separations, are unfunded and likely many years away from breaking ground. The city is expecting to complete an environmental review for the projects in fall 2027.
“It’s complicated, and the funding is also very challenging,” Burt said.
New road safety improvements like pavement parkings and reflective posts have reduced the number of cars going on the tracks but not the number of suicides, Legal Counsel James Harrison told Caltrain’s Finance Committee on Aug. 4.
“Unfortunately, that remains relatively consistent from year to year,” he said.
“There are peaks and troughs, but generally we see the same level of those unfortunate incidents.”