PROVO -- Residents who live within earshot of train tracks may rest easier in a couple of years.

Utah Transit Authority officials are hoping its "quiet zones" through Utah County will effectively eliminate the need for a train to sound its horn at every at-grade crossing. They peddled that to a few members of a tough crowd Tuesday night -- people who can hear those train horns at 2 a.m.

"It's an opportunity really for the public to see what's going to happen," said Steve Meyer, manager of engineering and construction for FrontRunner Commuter Rail, about the open house at the Provo city center Tuesday night.

Huge aerial maps covered tables in the lobby, laying out the tracks, which will be just west of the Union Pacific lines already in place, and UTA employees hovered around the tables ready to answer questions. The FrontRunner South line will be commuter rail that runs from Provo into Salt Lake; a FrontRunner train between Salt Lake and Ogden has been running for about 15 months.

One of the biggest question marks is safety. Meyer said the Federal Railroad Administration requires trains to sound a horn when crossing a road if no safety mechanisms exist around the intersection, such as the arm blocking traffic and the signal lights.

In Provo, at four of the nine planned crossings, UTA is implementing supplemental safety mechanisms such as the arms and raised medians that will not allow impatient drivers to drive around the waiting cars.

If these methods are as effective in keeping people and vehicles off train tracks as the attention-getting horn, eventually all of the crossings in Provo and throughout the valley will be quiet zones.

"That's a huge benefit for everybody who lives near the corridor," Meyer said.

Phil Uhl, who lives about a mile away from a train crossing in Provo, agreed. He liked the entire project.

"But I especially like the upgrades to the quiet rail crossings," he said, adding that would provide a huge quality-of-life upgrade for residents who live even closer to the train tracks. "You can hear that train from an awful long ways away."

Uhl said the safety measures were not as fool-proof as he'd thought they would be, but they're adequate, he believes. He said a person's desire to not get killed by a train also should help keep people aware of what's happening on the tracks.

Mayor Lewis Billings echoed Uhl's sentiment that part of the safety features had to include personal responsibility.

"You can't do anything that involves people where there's not a chance that somebody's going to get hurt," he said.

However, Billings said he believes UTA has done what is prudent and appropriate to keep people safe at rail crossings, and if the only solution to not having accidents on the train tracks is to not have train tracks, this is probably a better solution. Engineers have spent much of their time focusing on the details of how to make FrontRunner safe and functional.

The quiet zone is a necessary part of the project, he said, since this new infrastructure addition means more trains will be running daily through largely residential areas in Provo. That's just one of the issues the engineers have faced in this process.

"There of course are a lot of problems when bringing a major transportation infrastructure into an existing city," Billings said.

FrontRunner South could be finished by 2012 or 2013, Meyer said, although that date is dependent on the budget. Construction already has begun on some of the crossings in Provo, and UTA officials are keeping watch on the north FrontRunner line, which also has quiet zones and so far has had only a few incidents.

• Heidi Toth can be reached at (801) 344-2556 or htoth@heraldextra.com.