Highway Rail Grade Crossings PDF Download

"Railroad grade crossings are potential conflict points and pose a risk for all travelers. The degree of the risk depends on many factors such as volume train, volume of vehicles, speed of trains and vehicles, geometry of the crossing, etc. To assess the safety and risk of RR crossings, one may utilize aggregated data for the entire state or the country. Even though analysis of the aggregated data may be useful in establishing correlation among important variables, it might not be very useful for assessing the safety and risk for a given RR crossing. It is proposed to conduct a micro-level analysis to determine the risk of crashes at a given location (or a set of similar locations). The crash risk at a given crossing may depend on past crash history at that location, as well as the relation amount different elements that affect traffic safety at RR crossings. At the micro-level analysis one considers the uniqueness of each crossing and develops a risk factor for such crossings. Then, the safety and risk at system level is determined based on these individual safety and risk assessments. Phase one of this study is near completion and phase two will focus on safety and risk of accident at railroad crossing."--