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Marshall County is talking about installing crossing gates and warning lights where the main line of the Union Pacific Railroad intersects Beer Can Alley. At least, that’s what they used to call the dirt road just west of State Center. It’s one of those roads that never achieved its dream of gravel, let alone asphalt, and it handles less traffic than the philosophy aisle at the public library. It just sort of happened, long ago, as part of the scheme that gave Iowa the world’s most thorough system of roads.

From the air, the state looks like one big crossword puzzle, and the answer to every clue is: “expensive maintenance.”

According to the Marshalltown Times-Republican, it would cost more than $200,000 to put the proper safety equipment at this one, lonesome spot.

The alternative would be to close the road. The only ones who would miss it would be the people who make use of remote locations late at night in the dark, plus one or two farmers. A farmer could turn the road into a memory pretty quickly with a good field cultivator, but would miss the crossing for a long time. The loss would provide years of complaining about driving extra miles with tractors and combines.

The larger issue, of course, is that America is full of Beer Can Alleys. There must be lots of railroad crossings that aren’t as safe as they could be or should be.

Closing them might be the only choice. They don’t add much to the nation’s economy, and we can’t pour $200,000 into every one of them; eventually we’re going to run out of money. (Actually, we ran out of money a couple of months ago, but the public has requested that the media take a more positive tone.)

Union Pacific is offering Marshall County $35,000 to close the road, and the state of Iowa is willing to chip in $7,500. That’s almost enough to bring back the shuffleboard courts on the courthouse lawn in Marshalltown.

The option of leaving the crossing alone just isn’t acceptable anymore.

At Beer Can Alley, a fair number of freight trains go roaring past every single day. When you’re traveling 60 miles per hour, pulling 100 cars loaded with grain or coal, a dime is not something upon which you stop.

In the old, discredited way of thinking, one might argue that the landscape is flat and treeless out there, and the tracks are straight, so a reasonable driver can pause for five seconds and see what’s coming, even at night as long as the lead engine’s light is working. But that’s not how we do safety in the modern era.

For thousands of years, the prevailing safety standard, often uttered at a funeral, was “Jeez, he should have known better than to do that.” Now it’s “How was he supposed to know that getting struck by a locomotive is a bad thing?”

Railroad crossings are dangerous, no doubt about it. According to one source, America has more than 250,000 public and private at-grade crossings, and every year 300 to 400 people are killed at those places. It’s nothing to scoff at. We just have to decide whether a crossing where traffic can be counted on a “per decade” basis calls for the same technology as a four-lane crossing at a commuter line in a Chicago suburb.

No one is ever satisfied – a couple of years ago in downtown Des Moines, the complaint about train safety was that it’s too noisy. The blast of a locomotive horn is a heavy load of decibels, for sure, but it’s just about the least we can do. The next step down the safety scale would be requiring engineers to cross their fingers for luck.

We have to keep thinking about safety improvements, because it’s a stunningly dangerous world.

Unfortunately, the only thing standing between a perfect civilization and random tragedy is your tax money.