Rule #1: if you are at a railway crossing and you see a large object in motion coming down the track, then stop and let that large object pass before you try to cross the tracks!
The big issue with trains is that it has an inertia that our brain is not trained to.
As signalling engineers, we get to compute safe braking distances a lot and they are /big/, even at relatively low speed. This means that trains in curves -> do not have line of sight all the way to the next possible stop point <- so the driver may never have the chance to stop if you fall while crossing the track.
So don’t do it. Even at 30mph in curves, you are in danger.
"Human error" isn't a very useful "root cause" for any incident. Humans make errors.
But if there's a working automatic barrier, and the user bypasses it? Tough to see how you could UX your way around that.
https://www.fizzicseducation.com.au/articles/science-in-publ...
Is that clear? Most people don't get hit by trains, so I don't think that's clear. I'd say most people are cautious around trains while a minority aren't, and a minority of those who aren't will get hit by trains.
There's a physiological reason why people have a tendency to underestimate risk in certain situations, or miss obvious pending collisions. The usual comment from someone who has had such a collision is "They just came out of nowhere". See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23024275
Airplane pilots (particularly military fast jet), and ship captains are taught specific techniques to deliberately and systematically overcome these physiological limitations. Some of the techniques are taught in some driving schools (for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157090 ) and to be frank I think driving education should go all-out on it.
Might I still be hit by a train I never saw at all? Sure. Somebody I knew in highschool was hit by a train on a track he believed was abandoned and consequently, never looked down (he lived after being pushed 100m down the track). It's possible that might happen to me, at least if I ever forget that it happened to him. But what won't happen is getting hit by a train I see and judge to be moving slowly or not at all, because I stop for any train I see no matter how much time I think I might have to cross the track.
> Airplane pilots (particularly military fast jet), and ship captains are taught specific techniques to deliberately and systematically overcome these physiological limitations.
The "specific technique to overcome this physiological limitation" is: Don't race trains. Don't race trains even when you feel certain you can easily beat the train. Racing trains is stupid.
Nobody cares what you do all the time, though. In order to reduce accidents overall, we care about what the average person does. And if the average person does something else, then common sense isn't really the right term.
And even average person isn't the right bar. To really cut down on accidents, we need to see what the person who's behaviour is a couple of standard deviations less safe does in various scenarios.
It's quite evidently you don't think the average person is the right bar, because the average person doesn't race trains. 3000 a year is next to nothing compared to other common hazards.
Maybe we should eliminate all intersections, since although the average person obeys signal lights and signs, the occasional idiot chooses to run red lights instead. We should eliminate crosswalks too; the average person looks both ways before stepping into the street, but occasionally people don't (this happens FAR more often than train/car collisions.) Let's ban bicycles too; the average cyclist wears a helmet but some choose not to and get their heads split open. Let's also ban self-service gas stations; the average person can pump their own gas without burning the station down but sometimes some people fuck up and cause huge fires. Doesn't that mean we should all follow the lead of Oregon and New Jersey and ban this activity? 'Nobody' cares that you can pump your own gas safely, please be considerate of the rare idiot who can't.
I also find it amusing that all of the stories regarding train-car interactions seem to occur at crossings with modern signaling devices, rather than "at your own discretion" crossings in the middle of nowhere. This leads me to suspect that the typical human has been conditioned to treat any signalized intersection transition as a "beat the yellow" event, but in the case of a rail crossing the brutal physics equations seem to be conveniently ignored.
Perhaps there needs to be a day in driver's education courses where everyone has to review just how heavy a freight train is and how much kinetic energy must be dissipated in order for it to come to a complete stop. Maybe make them ride at the front of a train to experience how painfully long an emergency braking maneuver takes to complete.
This kind of accident is so common I remember the government commissioning a series of funny PSA ads that played on national TV showing people acting recklessly at railway crossings, getting killed and then expressing their regrets from beyond the grave.
A large part of this is due to population density (or trip density) around the crossing. If you've got 1000x the number of trips on a crossing, a 100x safer crossing is still 10x more likely to result in a colission. Fill in your own estimates, as my numbers are clearly made up. Also, guidelines require more signalling in built up / dense areas, and at intersections with a history of colissions.
Additionally, if you have a colission at an unguarded intersection, the response is often to consider a guard, and if it happens again, the story is 'senseless officials refuse to put in guard' rather than 'sensless person disobeys guard and is injured/causes confusion and delay'
Personnally, I belong to the school of « remove them all, whatever the costs ». A little extreme, but €&@% I hate these things.
Edit: Clarified that it is written test.
The things is, I don't remember the written test I took having any content at all about railroad crossings.
Physics tells us that we should accelerate to spend the least amount of time in the danger zone (rail bed). Since the velocities are orthogonal, it doesn't matter if you are hit by a train when your car is going 55 or 5 MPH (probably, unless trees in the resulting vector of your now pulped car).
It never made any sense to me to see school busses stopping at a grade crossing, then taking an extraordinarily long time to cross those tracks. What happens if the engine fails while on those tracks and a high speed train appears.
No, my vote is to make sure you have a clear view of the tracks in both directions and punch it. Less probability of interacting with a train.
Those that ignore the signals and live, that is.