If Nashville wants to be a truly walkable and bikeable city (or even just have less gridlock for drivers), then we have to figure out how not to randomly trap people on the wrong side of the tracks while a train blocks traffic. (Ask me about the time I got stuck, on foot, while a train was in the middle of the street for more than an hour, and I ended up having to call a Lyft to drive me several miles around the train to get to a place I could see through the immobile cars.) Between my house and the gym, there’s a possibility of being blocked by freight trains at three different intersections. The unpredictability — what time the trains come by, how long they sit motionless — is annoying. The diagonal tracks at Fourth Avenue South and Chestnut Street are, by far, the most frustrating: Because Fourth is a one-way street, options for turning around and taking a different route are limited.
So infinite thanks to Cohub, the Wedgewood-Houston software company that wrote the 4th Ave Train Spotter app. The free app gives you a green “light” if both Chestnut and Fourth are open, a yellow one if one of the two streets is blocked by a train, or a red one if both are blocked. Check it before you get too far down Fourth, and you can reroute in advance rather than getting stuck. Cohub uses code and signals from CSX to make their predictions. I don’t understand how it works, and I don’t have to. Until we get pedestrian overpasses or tunnels, I just have to have it downloaded … and come up with a different excuse for why I’m late to gym class.Â
—Margaret Littman
Contributor, Nashville Scene
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