By Tracy Zafian, UMTC Research Fellow
The UMTC Research Section Launches a Research Spotlight YouTube Channel. We are showcasing research currently being conducted on “At-Grade Rail Crossing Safety” by Radhameris Gomez. Ms. Gomez is a PhD candidate in the UMass Transportation Engineering Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. View the overview video (3 minutes) or the extended video (10 minutes) to find out how she became interested in studying transportation engineering.
Crashes at roadway-railroad intersections happen far too often. Federal Railroad Administration data show that 2,025 such crashes occurred in the United States in 2016, resulting in 265 fatalities and 798 injuries. There have been a number of roadway-rail intersection crashes recently. For example, in Florida, an Amtrak train collision with a car left one person dead; in Arkansas, one person was killed and another injured when their car crossed into a train’s path; and in North Carolina, a train crashed into a car that stopped on the railroad tracks when the safety arms came down, and the car driver was killed. Earlier in March, a freight train collided with a charter bus in Mississippi that had become stuck on a rail crossing with low clearance on the crest of a slope. Four people were killed and others injured; it was the 161st crash since 1976 at that crossing. After a March snowstorm, a local DPW worker in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, died when his snowplow backed onto railroad tracks when a train was coming. At that intersection, there are no gate arms or traffic signals to help warn drivers when a train would be coming; there had been five other crashes and four other deaths at that location since the 1970s.
Previous studies have examined primary contributing factors for grade-crossing train-car crashes and how these crashes can be prevented. Jeff Caird and colleagues at the University of Calgary analyzed over 300 grade-crossing crashes in Canada (2002). They estimated that adding flashing lights to a rail crossing without them has the potential to reduce crashes by over 60 percent, as compared to crossbucks alone. Michael Lenné and colleagues at Monash University in Australia conducted a driving simulator study (2010) on driving behavior at three different types of at-grade rail crossings: stop-controlled, with flashing lights, and with a traffic signal. The researchers found that participants slowed their vehicles the most when approaching rail crossings with flashing lights.