Train Horn Quiet Zone in Downtown Cedar Rapids Will Cost Millions

CEDAR RAPIDS - City Hall is talking anew about establishing a quiet zone in the downtown by installing drop-down crossing guards at rail crossings to end the need for piercing horn blasts from freight trains.

This week, though, a City Council committee was reminded that such a change will cost millions of dollars.

Tom Peterson, the city's new traffic engineer, estimated the cost of installing crossing guards at the downtown rail crossings at between a few million dollars to $10 million or more.

The cost will be more if the City Council decides to convert one-way avenues in the downtown to two-ways, a change which the council also has been considering for a few years.

Peterson said the cost could be $500,000 at each crossing of a two-way street.

In the near term, Peterson told the council's Infrastructure Committee that the full council will see a proposal in June to spend $370,000 for a study to find the best way to implement a quiet zone and the costs associated with it. The study will note costs if one-ways remain one-ways and if they change to two-ways.

Peterson said little federal money is available to implement such a quiet zone. One way to reduce costs is to close lesser-used streets at crossings, he noted.

City Manager Jeff Pomeranz has resurrected earlier council discussions about a downtown quiet zone, saying that the city should not have train horns blaring in the middle of the night outside the Five Seasons Hotel, which the city now owns and is planning to spend millions of dollars to renovate so it remains an upscale hotel.

Peterson said the quiet zone likely wouldn't be in effect until the end of 2013.