It was around 1 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon at Wards Corner. The red lights flashed, the bells rang and the bars lowered at the train tracks there. Traffic ground to a halt.

Ashley Washington was in the middle of giving an Uber passenger a ride when she got stuck at the crossing.

“It sucks, because sometimes you might be on a time crunch, you might have to get to work, or if I’m Ubering, the person I’m Ubering may have somewhere they need to be,” she said. “Unfortunately, the trains don’t care about our time schedule.”

The drivers stretching across three lanes would wait for 9 minutes for the train to pass.