Safety at highway-rail grade crossings (HRGCs) is a concern with more than&nbsp;2000 incidents and accidents each year across the United States. &nbsp;One contributing factor to safety may be the added cognitive processing drivers need to engage in at certain HRGC types, in particular those with limited space or short-storage between the track and highway intersection (c.f., Ambros, et al., 2019; Campbell, et al., 2015; Tustin et al., 1986). &nbsp;Therefore, in order to evaluate this possibility, we coded and analyzed incidents in the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Safety reports database. While many studies have used the FRA Safety database to examine contributing factors to safety (c.f., Ghomi et al., 2016; Hu et al., 2010; Liu et al., 2015; Oh et al., 2006), none have systematically compared short-storage and non-short storage HRGC incidents.&nbsp; This paper contributes to safety research in two ways. First, we establish the base rate for short-storage incidents based on the FRA database.&nbsp; Second, we quantitatively compare the frequency distribution of motorist behaviors and outcomes at short-storage HRGCs to those at non-short-storage HRGCs. Starting with FRA highway-rail incidents from 2017-2019 across six US states:&nbsp; Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, we identified a total of 996 HRGC incidents.&nbsp; Using Google Earth images of each crossing, these 996 incidents were coded for type of HRGC and details about the HRGC (e.g., distance between track and intersection). &nbsp;Our findings indicated some systematic differences in incidents based on HRGC type.&nbsp; Overall, 20.3% of the incidents involved short-storage HRGCs and 79.7% involved non-short-storage HRGCs. This base rate of 20% short-storage HRGC incidents was consistent across all three years in our sample. Next, we compared the frequency&nbsp;of these incidents by the two HRGC types (short storage and non-short storage) in terms of motorist characteristics, decision behaviors (e.g. stopping or not), and incident outcomes (e.g., rail strike vs. vehicle strike, injury severity). Results from this series of chi-squared tests indicated that older drivers (compared to middle age and younger drivers) represented a higher proportion of the short-storage incidents, compared to non-short storage HRGC incidents. This suggests that short-storage HRGCs affect older adults at a higher rate due to their added complexity.&nbsp; Next, we found that pre-crash decision behavior was also associated with HRGC type, Χ2(3) = 29.28, p=.0001. For non-short storage HRGCs incidents, 58% of motorists were moving across the rail crossing at the time of the incident, compared to 38% in short-storage HRGCs. In contrast, 42% of motorists were stopped on the tracks in short-storage HRGC incidents, compared to 28% in non-short storage HRGCs incidents. &nbsp;Finally, short-storage HRGC incidents resulted in a higher rate of train strikes compared to vehicle strikes than non-short storage incidents, Χ2(1) = 15.87, p=.001, but&nbsp;did not affect injury severity. &nbsp;In fact, there was no effect of HRGC type on injury severity in these data. &nbsp;Given that incidents at short-storage HRGCs were different from non-short storage HRGC incidents, it suggests that different interventions and countermeasures for consideration may improve safety. This initial analysis of real-world short-storage incidents suggests that further research in the field or lab to understand driver decision behavior and attention at short-storage crossing may improve overall rail safety.

Improving Highway-Rail Safety at Cognitively Complex Intersections: Examining the Impact of Short-Storage Crossings on Driver Decision Behavior and Incident Outcome

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/JRC/JRC2021/volume/84775

2021 Joint Rail Conference (JRC2021)

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