One of the first things a young person is supposed to learn when leaving the house is to look both ways before crossing the street. Or, even more important, crossing the railroad track.

But here is the Utah Transit Authority, first making it impossible for any pedestrian at some of the crossings along its new TRAX light rail lines to actually see oncoming trains. And then going out of its way to obscure its own thought processes on how it first decided to build, then decided to remove, sections of sound-buffering walls at crossings that made those intersections, in the words of a prescient critic, "an accident waiting to happen."

The I-told-you-sos are maddening. And the unwillingness to discuss them infuriating. But more important than any paper trail should be the fact that a large agency that does nothing but transit, that has been running light rail for more than a decade and recently added commuter trains to its portfolio, did not see the safety hazard it was creating, with or without any outside prodding.

The Tribune reported Sunday, after pushing for information through the Utah Government Records and Management Act, that the transit agency had been warned that the sound buffers it had erected along its new Mid-Jordan TRAX line made those crossings unacceptably dangerous.

They were warnings that proved all too correct, as a 15-year-old girl crossing the tracks was killed by an oncoming train that she apparently neither saw nor heard, at least partly because of the way the crossing was designed.

One concern, properly noted by the UTA bureaucracy but not acted upon, came from a West Jordan woman who is part of a longtime railroad family. Another, reported previously, was registered by a driver education teacher who witnessed a frightening incident that nearly killed a child at another crossing about three weeks before the fatal accident. That was reported, through school district channels, to UTA, but without leaving any official record.

The walls have been altered, and the crossings are now safer than they were.

But UTA has continued to drag its feet on opening up its decision-making process, continuing to withhold internal documents on its safety deliberations, on the flimsy grounds that to do so would raise "homeland security" issues.

It is not surprising that the agency would clam up now, in the face of a likely lawsuit from the girl's family.

But the UTA's apparent habit of preferring sensory deprivation — for itself and for others — is an issue that should only make everyone demand more transparency.