6 Railroad Crossings
6.1.4 Target Crash Population
It appears that technology treatments aimed at rural crossings may be aimed largely at grade crossings with passive control. A FARS query2 was used to examine manner of collision by Traffic Control Device at Rail Grade Crossings. Table 5 shows that 77 rural fatal crashes happened at crossings with cross bucks, 19 at crossings with stop signs, and 23 at crossings with another railroad crossing sign. While these numbers are low, this crash population should be highly preventable and is a politically hot issue.
 Table 5: Manner of Collision by Traffic Control Device at Rail Grade Crossings - 1009 Rural Fatal Crashes. |
Systems that are used at crossings with flashing lights (such as the in-vehicle warning system) address the population of crashes that occur at those locations. It can be seen in the table, that in 1998, 33 fatal crashes occurred at grade crossings with flashing lights active traffic control. However, in order to prevent all of these crashes, all vehicles, not just school buses, would have to be equipped with the in-vehicle devices, and drivers would have to heed the warning and not proceed into the crossing when a train is present.
A workshop was held in May 1999 on the use of ITS at highway rail grade crossings. While most of the systems discussed at the workshop were urban, the panel noted that the application of ITS technologies to railroad crossings is also a rural issue. The panel noted that passive crossings are most common in rural areas and that these passive crossings have been given heightened Federal scrutiny.13
The author believes that the application of more active systems or ITS at rural railroad grade crossings has the potential to reduce the frequency of rural railroad grade crossing crashes. However, with the high numbers of rural passive crossings, it would be quite expensive for the railroads to equip all of these crossing with additional equipment. It would likely be worthwhile to identify crossings with a relatively high number of crashes, and consider applying treatments there first. This would be a similar process to identifying “Hot Spots” for safety warning systems. Development of a low-cost detection system, as described, should help in widespread deployment at crossings with crash histories.