Agency Taps Mapping Technology to Curb Rail Crossing Accidents

Shop deals on ebay
Advertise with us
shop deals on amazon
Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum

Help Support Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
jebr

jebr

Enthusiastic Transit Rider
AU Supporting Member
Gathering Team Member
Joined
Jan 23, 2012
Messages
4,928
Location
"The Last Great City of the East," St. Paul, MN
After a sharp increase in the number of rail crossing accidents last year, the Federal Railroad Administration plans to announce a new partnership with Google on Monday to provide the locations of all grade crossings in the company’s popular map application.
Google has agreed to include information from the United States Department of Transportation’s vast database to pinpoint every rail crossing in the country in Google Maps. Google will also add audio and visual alerts to the app for when drivers use the turn-by-turn navigation feature.
Click to expand...
Source

Or, my preferred summation (from a blog:)

Google Plans To Integrate Railroad Crossing Locations In Maps Because Dumb People Keep Getting Hit By Trains
 
Just more specious warnings to add to the zillions of other well-meaning-but-redundant warnings everybody has learned to ignore.

And, yet more: now that it's being added to smartphone apps, even more reason to keep your nose in your phone and remain blissfully unaware of the the immediate doom about to befall you (and, unfortunately, others around you).

:angry2:
 
Railway Age article on this effort: FRA and Google team up on grade crossing safety. Excerpt:

Google has agreed to partner with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) on grade crossing safety, the agency announced on June 29, 2015.

Google will use the FRA’s GIS data that pinpoints nearly every rail crossing in the country (approximately 250,000) so the tech giant can add audio-visual alerts of an upcoming rail crossing when a driver uses the turn-by-turn navigation feature. FRA Acting Administrator Sarah Feinberg has also asked four other major companies that develop map applications—Apple, MapQuest, Garmin and Tom Tom—to partner with the agency.

The FRA says that last year approximately 270 people died in highway-rail collisions, compared to 232 in 2013—up 16.4%. 94% of accidents at rail crossings are due to driver inattention and error, FRA adds.

When Feinberg came on board in January, a spate of rail crossing deaths and accidents occurred, “so she decided to take a fresh look at the problem and followed up swiftly with action,” FRA said. “Feinberg focused more resources toward rail crossing safety to raise awareness, increase enforcement and invest in smarter engineering. Working with these tech companies is part of the smarter engineering effort to help educate drivers. Feinberg is also leveraging her experience as a former Facebook executive and her relationships in Silicon Valley to bring one of the nation’s newest industries together with government to solve one of the nation’s oldest problems and to prevent, and ultimately end, deaths and accidents at rail crossings.”
Click to expand...
If this project with the GPS direction map devices and apps cuts grade crossing collisions even by a small percentage, it will be worthwhile. Especially for Amtrak. Saw that the CONO was in a grade crossing collision over the weekend and ended up running 9 hours late.
 
Link the train's GPS to Google, correlate with the automobile's GPS location, and predetermined route, (if used) and be ready to send different degrees of WARNINGS, if the auto nears the crossing, at the same time the train (freight or pax) approaches.

It could work.
 
Ryan said:
More simple would be equipment at the grade crossing that says "train coming" to an automated car that refuses to enter the grade crossing.
Click to expand...
There are 215,000 grade crossings in the US. Pretty sure that most of them only have cross bucks, no gates, lights, or sensors. So a computer controlled car would not have any signal to receive. Come to think of it, would not be surprised if the computer driven cars have avoided non-signaled grade crossings in the field tests and demos done so far. Challenging problem on how to handle non-gated grade crossings.

Still, a computer driven car that refuses to drive around lowered crossing arms at gated crossings would prevent a decent percentage of the grade crossing collisions involving Amtrak. Many of the recent collisions have been due to people driving around the crossing arms because they think a slow freight train is coming. An interesting exercise would be to estimate how many grade crossing collisions in a year could be eliminated by automated cars removing the weak link in the car - the idiot behind the wheel.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Perhaps in the future, automated cars will have some version similar to the TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) used in aircraft. Such a system could also receive real time warning of approaching trains, regardless of what protection any crossing may have, Trains would also have the TCAS transponders to be compatible....
 
I saw an interesting video about TCAS. It makes me not want to fly any more, especially in Airbus aircraft as the autopilot takes in the unsecured TCAS information and acts on its own if TCAS says it should!! Someone could easily spoof TCAS packets, making the plane turn away from a fake aircraft!
 
Traffic! Traffic!

Terrain! Terrain!

Whoooop! Whoooop! Pull Up!

Whoooop! Whoooop! Pull Up!

:p
 

Latest posts

Back
Top