Applying Safety Treatments To Rail-Highway At-Grade Crossings

At-grade rail crossings provide different levels of warnings and/or barriers to alert drivers to the potential dangers presented by approaching trains. For some drivers, an activated warning system, rather than being a signal to stop, merely serves as a cue for the need to make a decision whether or not to cross. In California, for the ten-year period from 2001 to 2010, the result was 1,033 trainvehicle crashes resulting in 157 deaths and 458 injuries. The best solution to rail crossing crashes is to remove the need for the driver to engage in a potentially faulty decision-making process by making it impossible, or at least very difficult, for the driver to bypass lowered gates. Two low-technology, low-cost, low-maintenance methods: median separators and long-arm gates, have been deployed in many locations and have been shown to prevent deaths and injuries while remaining economically feasible. Highway-railway grade crossing collisions tend to be spread over a vast number of sites, with few (if any) occurring at any given site in any given year. To improve safety at all 6,443 grade crossings in California to some uniform standard would be prohibitively expensive and impractical. Therefore, any comprehensive safety program must begin by first identifying crossings where the risk of collision is unacceptably high, and where safety countermeasures are most warranted.