Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

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I love how this article tries to make this sound like a complex affair. Only the most ridiculously stupid person would be in a situation where they are continuously trying to judge the position of the train relative to their own position as they attempt to beat a crossing. The only situation where you should ever be remotely in danger is if all of your braking and steering catastrophically fail at that exact moment and there is nothing to stop you from rolling directly into the train.

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.

Here in India we seem to have a large number of such ridiculously stupid people (perhaps a consequence of having a large number of people in general) but it also becomes a street-cred thing as someone in front of you beats the train at a railway crossing and now you look like a wuss if you just stand there and wait for the train to pass.

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.

> 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.

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'

Be careful, as many topics in railway signalling, this is actually fairly complicated and tricky. As I said in another comment, crossings are pure evil. They are many hazardous scenario and without any system inside the car, mitigations are not fail safe.

Personnally, I belong to the school of « remove them all, whatever the costs ». A little extreme, but €&@% I hate these things.

In German written driving license test, there is a section literally dedicated for railway crossings.

Edit: Clarified that it is written test.

In my state of Georgia it was the only thing I failed on my driving test (we didn't have driver's ed when I a kid, you just practiced with your parents and then took one test). I yielded and looked but didn't come to a full stop. I remember it took 15 or 25 points off of my score, but since it was the only thing I failed, I still passed the exam.

The things is, I don't remember the written test I took having any content at all about railroad crossings.

> I yielded and looked but didn't come to a full stop.

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.

Thanks, 17-year-old me feels validated.

90 day license suspensions for those who ignore signals should do it.

Those that ignore the signals and live, that is.

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