The locomotive versus push pull-dmu-light rail comparison is mostly pish posh for trial lawyers to try to fool juries.

When it comes to rail vehicle collisions I've seen locomotive hauled trains hit things and derail every single car, on the other hand I've seen the photos of a taxicab full of people driven by a drunk driver that raced the Blue Line and lost, killing everyone, but leaving the train virtually undamaged, and no one hurt on the train. 

The applicable standards for grade crossing safety standards should be state of the art, for such a system, including, where appropriate, taffic signal integration.

And, the applicable crash worthiness standards will apply to SMART. 

We have one guy who thinks that students at Dorsey High are going to be too dumb to stop for the Expo Line and get run over. He's using that argument to try to stop that line.

The Gold Line goes by Blair High in Pasadena, and the students there all appear to have more sense than to stand in front of a moving train. Drunken adults, well that's another story? 

So you will probably hear the "trains will kill our children" argument, given the hucksterism and hysteria of the train haters in Novato. That nonsense was used on the Gold Line, too.

I've never heard any of these self styled "safety" advocates urge that we should ban cars because of the terrible toll of children or the elderly killed in crosswalks, and that is a very real and serious problem! 

The grade into Cal State San Marcos is over 4% on Sprinter and the Siemens DMU's do just fine. I don't know of any cases like that on any of the NWP that SMART would be using.

No grades like that anywhere on the northern end that I recall, either. These railroads are done all over the world, just like building roads. Not that complicated, and statistically speaking much much safer for everyone, compared to driving.