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Have you ever heard of the NIMBY effect? It stands for Not In My Backyard, and applies to opposition against any kind of less-than-totally-desirable entity being built or housed near where you live--nuclear waste, prisons, hog farms, commuter trains... ...commuter trains? What's so bad about those? Well, apparently for some living along the path of the new WES commuter rail line from Wilsonville to Beaverton, the positives of having a major transportation mode placed near their homes are outweighed by the heedless decision to, y'know, make sure nobody gets run over by a train because they didn't hear it. Yes, despite the tracks having been there long before most of the houses, and despite trains going by using their diesel horns on a regular basis, there is now a great outcry about the noise of the horns coming from WES trains. Are there more trains going by now than before? Yes. Is it a pretty damned loud horn? Well, yeah. That's on purpose. But should it have been a surprise that trains use horns when they go through a crossing? Doubtful. Part of the issue is that the trains are run by Western and Pacific, and the switches are jointly their responsibility, ODOT's, and the federal Rail Administration's, but the entity catching all the flack is the City of Tualatin. It is apparently possible to mitigate the noise using better switching technology...but the price tag is about $5 million more than Tualatin has to spare these days: $5 million. That might be hard enough for some citizens to hear (pun intended), but what really seems to be chapping their hides is that the City recently floated bonds for a $50 million rec center. Nevermind that one typically doesn't go out and pay for local rail improvements (for rails you don't own) on the back of the City's bond portfolio, or that in the end it really wasn't their responsibility at all; if you live near the tracks I guess quieter mornings are worth more than enhanced recreational facilities for an entire city. Maybe this is actually an example of PIMBY--Please in My Backyard (would you put the noise inhibiting system in)--but while the outrage seems a little hysterical and disproportionate, I can understand the abrupt shock of discovering that you'll be getting 5:30 AM wakeup calls each weekday from now on. But what's this joker's point? After December's severe weather fiasco and more recently the noisy after-effects of the WES launch, it seems that TriMet is always long on excuses but short on solutions to the problems that they create ("Train horn wake-up call unwelcome in Tualatin," Feb. 11).
Besides the loss of livability that I might be forced to endure if I lived in Tualatin, I would be significantly concerned about the potential loss of resale value of my home as a result of the WES noise.
Without a solution, this amounts to an illegal "taking" of a substantial amount of my property value by a government agency and I wouldn't hesitate to file a lawsuit demanding either compensation or (more preferably) elimination of the noise.
DAVID GAFFNEY
Hillsboro
Leaving aside for a moment the unsubstantiated, speculative and frankly nutty thesis--that somehow this represents a "taking" of property under the eminent domain clause of the Constitution, and that the loss in value from the horn isn't more than outweighed by the value gain from having, uh, A COMMUTER RAIL LINE RIGHT NEAR YOUR HOUSE, I have to wonder...why the hell does David Gaffney, Hillsboro resident, care? Is Mr. Gaffney a professional gadfly, a complainer for hire, a carping consultant? This might be the first documented case of budding NIYBYism...Not In Your Backyard. Oh yeah? Well, I don't think I like the idea of Hillsboro annexing all those unincorporated "land islands," either. And I'm mad as hell about it! Where's my special "letter to the editor" pen, and my "I'm with stupid" T-shirt? Ah, there they are...
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