Driver behavior at rail highway crossings has been the subject of numerous studies, most of which show that violations are relatively commonplace. The focus of this paper will be on those drivers who drive around fully descended gates. Drivers commonly misjudge the speed and distance of trains. They must make a decision about the time remaining before the train arrives based on sensory signals as well as non-sensory factors such as expectations and motivation. At a gated crossing, where drivers have been alerted to the imminent danger by lowered gates, there is more to be gained by preventing gate running, or at least making it very difficult, than by attempting to aid drivers in making a better informed decision as to whether or not there is sufficient time to clear the crossing before the train arrives. This is especially true given people’s innate inability to judge the speed of a large object coming directly at them, both because the growth in size is not linear, and because human vision underestimates the speed of large objects. Given the costs involved in closing or making a crossing impenetrable, it is worthwhile looking at other approaches that can cost effectively reduce gate-running. These include long-arm gates, medians, photo enforcement, and four-quadrant gates.

At-grade rail crossings provide different levels of warnings and/or barriers to alert drivers to the potential dangers presented by approaching trains. For some drivers, an activated warning system, rather than being a signal to stop, merely serves as a cue for the need to make a decision whether or not to cross. In California, for the ten-year period from 2001 to 2010, the result was 1,033 trainvehicle crashes resulting in 157 deaths and 458 injuries. 

The best solution to rail crossing crashes is to remove the need for the driver to engage in a potentially faulty decision-making process by making it impossible, or at least very difficult, for the driver to bypass lowered gates. Two low-technology, low-cost, low-maintenance methods: median separators and long-arm gates, have been deployed in many locations and have been shown to prevent deaths and injuries while remaining economically feasible. 

Highway-railway grade crossing collisions tend to be spread over a vast number of sites, with few (if any) occurring at any given site in any given year. To improve safety at all 6,443 grade crossings in California to some uniform standard would be prohibitively expensive and impractical. Therefore, any comprehensive safety program must begin by first identifying crossings where the risk of collision is unacceptably high, and where safety countermeasures are most warranted. 

Predicting the degree of safety present at highway-railroad grade crossings using accident prediction models is a common approach. These models are usually developed using a highwayrailroad grade crossing database (primarily that maintained by the Federal Railroad Administration using data supplied by each state) consisting of crossing characteristics and accident data for a given period of time. From the perspective of the California Division of Rail, however, the search for the ideal formula or ranking system is immaterial given the current state of its rail crossing inventory database (which is the responsibility of the California Public Utilities Commission) with its often inaccurate as well as incomplete information. 

At present, the only meaningful statistic for which there is data is crash history, which leads to the difficult question of what constitutes a dangerous rail-highway crossing. If a crossing has an incident every twenty years, it would be hard to argue that the crossing is dangerous. But what if a crash occurs there every ten years, or every five years? At what point does a crossing become dangerous and in need of remedial action? 

An examination of gated sites with multiple crashes between 1986 and 2010 shows that the median time between crashes ranges from 6.1 years at sites with two crashes to 2.75 years at sites with five crashes. Also of interest is the length of time it took each site to accumulate its crashes. These range from 5 days to 24 years for sites with two crashes to 8 to 23 years at sites with five crashes. Certainly a crossing with five incidents over the course of eight years can be labeled as dangerous, but what about those crossings with incidents spread out over twenty or more years? If a crossing is truly dangerous and in need of remedial action, how do so many vehicles make it safely across resulting in several years passing without an incident? 

Since so much depends on the accuracy of our state’s inventory database, bringing it up to date and putting it into a readily accessible format should be the top priority for all involved in California rail. Once that is accomplished, crossings will be able to be properly evaluated by looking for commonalities at sites where crashes have occurred in the past.

This report examines conditions affecting vehicle-train collisions at rail crossings in California, and recommends effective countermeasures and implementation strategies. In doing so, the report helps meet California’s goal of efficiently utilizing state and federal funding available through SAFETEA-LU for increasing the safety at public atgrade rail-highway crossings

This report presents and describes the expanded database containing 873 aviation accidents which occurred within five miles of an airport. Section 2 contains a description of the development of the database and a discussion of the criteria used in selecting accidents for the database. Section 3 provides a description of the database itself as well as a set of statistics that provide a comprehensive overview of the accidents. A set of aircraft accident scatter plots developed from the accident data points is presented in section 4. The purpose of these plots is to provide a picture of the distribution of accidents over space.

Workplace motor vehicle incidents at Caltrans are a significant cause of injuries, employee lost time, and property damage. Because backing crashes are major contributors to motor vehicle incidents, identifying and promoting methods of reducing backing accidents is a top priority. According to internal Caltrans’ data, 92.3% of workplace backing crashes were preventable by the driver. Backing crashes are the single largest category of preventable crashes, representing 30% of preventable crashes in the Caltrans fleet. From 1998 through 2007, preventable backing crashes cost Caltrans at least $5.45 million in vehicle repairs alone.

The Traffic Safety Center (TSC) at the University of California-Berkeley completed this study, which examines Caltrans crash data from the Safety Information Management System (SIMS) and identifies trends in backing-related crashes. The findings describe how these crashes are distributed across Caltrans sites, various work locations, and among vehicle types. This study also presents a summary of a literature review of technological solutions to backing crashes, a summary of results from a Caltrans backing prevention technology pilot, and an outline for a proposed Field Operational Test of promising backing technologies. Based on careful review of Caltrans data and backing incident counter-measures, the study evaluates current Caltrans safety policies relevant to backing crashes and offers recommendations for strengthening them.

Rail crossing crashes have declined in the past 30 years, both nationally and in California. This is largely attributed to the closing of a large number of crossings as well as the deployment of a wide range of countermeasures, including signal systems, gating and grade separation programs. However, the number of crashes and subsequent injuries and deaths is still unacceptably high. Rail crossings provide different levels of warnings from four-quadrant gates down to stop signs. To understand how the state of California can best utilize state and federal funding available through SAFETEA-LU for making the state’s 7,719 at-grade rail-highway crossings safer, this report presents an analysis of the effectiveness of different types of railroad crossing warning devices with a cost-benefit comparison.

The safety of both employees and the motoring public is of paramount importance to Caltrans, resulting in a continuing effort to improve the operating vehicle fleet. The potential safety changes that are the focus of this project are those that involve safety equipment enhancement over and above the original specifications for the vehicle or outside of the scope of the original equipment design or purpose, such as rear view backup video cameras.

The motivation for this project was Division of Equipment (DOE) managers' need for an objective strategy to address safety equipment deployment issues. These include determining where equipment changes should be made, whether statewide or only in specific locations, what types of vehicles will be involved, and how the changes should be made, for example, immediately retrofitting certain vehicles or changing the specifications for future vehicles.

Neither question needs to be answered on an absolute basis; for example, it may be appropriate to immediately retrofit particular vehicles in certain locations while changing the specifications for new vehicles to be deployed in other locations. Additionally, the problem may have non-equipment solutions such as changes to policies and procedures.