Tech companies ignore pleas on rail safety

a) they all have money, lots and lots of money

b) they have been proven to not having taken action even though "safety advocates" have asked for years.

c) as such they are ripe for some cherry picked court to fine them

There are many many warnings we encounter in daily life which only exist to protect not just the consumer but the manufacturer or service provider from unscrupulous lawyers and political officials who would otherwise exploit the situation.

no snark intended, however we live in a society where someone else is always to blame and usually someone with money which can be taken by penalty or forfeiture in trial or settlement.

I think there is a middle ground. Apps could announce the upcoming railroad crossing just like they do with a left/right turn. Somewhat of a silly example, but if there is a river at the end of a road and your only option is a left or a right, the app will not help stop you for driving the car into the river, but the instruction to go right or left does (albeit accidentally) help you avoid that. I don't see why it won't do the same with rail crossings.

Although you should focus on road signs more than you do the app, there could be a dangerous situation in which the app says "make a left turn at the light", but before reaching the light there is a railroad crossing. Of course you need to stop at that, but the app can enhance the situation but treating it like another instruction. I see no problem here but an overall safety enhancement.

Making safety features redundant increases total safety.

Agreed. Why not put automatic vehicle barriers at all grade crossings? Or at least the known dangerous ones.

Here's the FRA's interactive map:

https://fragis.fra.dot.gov/GISFRASafety/

They have extended information about the crossings.

Perhaps it would be nice if I got a small verbal audio cue from whatever navigation app I was using a minute or so before reaching the rail crossing. We already get these notifications when it's time to make a turn and rail crossings aren't so frequent as to make such warnings annoying.

I could certainly imagine that if e.g. Waze warned about railroad crossings that it could prevent some small percentage of almost sleeping drivers/truckers getting hit.

It's a numbers game. 999/1000 will be watching just fine without a warning from their navigation app; that warning might bring awareness to 999.8/1000 or so. Or something like that. That could result in a pretty dramatic decrease of accidents.

This seems like a no-brainer to me - they should add a (visual) warning about this.

Yeah, this is ridiculous. Watch the damn road. Not everything bad that happens to someone is someone else's fault. You can be the victim of your own actions.

There is no shortage of videos of people in cars pulling in front of visible trains. Drivers stop over rail tracks all of the time. Frequently pedestrians hit by trains, excluding suicides, have earphones in.

> Funding, however, remained unavailable in Ventura County for the estimated $35 million grade separation project.

That's the key line in that article. Adding it to Google Maps doesn't fix this. Putting up a sign that says "No idiot, don't turn here" doesn't fix this. Better driver training doesn't fix this. Better working time rules (the driver was "severely fatigued") doesn't fix this.

Grade separation fixes this.

...and then got stuck on the tracks:

The truck driver is reported to have driven along the tracks having turned too early before the intersection at Fifth Street and then having gotten his wheels jammed in the tracks from which he was then unable to extricate it.

It's a little surprising, since you'd think a truck would be high enough to clear the rails, or that he would immediately realise and try to reverse back into the intersection, but I guess panic set in.

Some of it is people driving down the railway track. It may be confusing at night (all the incidents I could find mentioned in the bottom happened at night), particularly if there is a road junction immediately following the railway crossing, that you were supposed to turn on. Then an indicator to 'cross the railway, and then turn right' would be nice.

Although, I wonder whether US railway crossings can be hard to see at night.

They are usually well marked, but only higher traffic ones have barriers.

Many don't have lights.

In many places in the US, there are only flashing lights to indicate a train. Where I grew up in the rural midwest, this was very common on county roads routinely with speed limits over 50mph. Even if aggressively starting the flashing lights early, there are just extremely common situations where you’re going 50mph just to keep safe with the flow of traffic and the light flashes at the wrong time and you can’t stop. It could easily result in accidents even for people who are very cautious of train crossings.

In a lot of cases, the lack of an actual automated barrier is just down to budget & maintenance costs. The sparse communities can’t afford to pay to install them or maintain them, and there are too many train crossings that are too spread out rurally for the state to maintain them. If one of them malfunctioned there could be lawsuits, or it could block road traffic on critical county roads where the nearest possible alternate route might be tens of miles away, and the road is needed for school buses, emergencg vehicles, snow removal, etc.

So in total these communities just accept the risk because it’s logistically intractable otherwise.

Compared with the UK where I previously lived, the US has a large number of railway crossings in urban and suburban areas, full stop. So many of these would be a bridge or cutting in the UK. I used to live in a city where the train literally ran down the middle of the road. Secondly the marking is somewhat understated and can look confusingly similar to a regular intersection, many do not have barriers, and many are adjacent to or run through a road intersection with conventional lights, for added confusion. Finally, the US allows right-turn on red, so it’s normal to pass through a red light and make a turn.

In all fairness, in Boston/Cambridge, students have been ripping open the top of rental trucks on Storrow and Memorial Drives since long before there were navs/phones. (Admittedly, the warnings didn't used to be as prominent as they are today.)