Distracted Motor Vehicle Driving at Highway–Rail Grade Crossings

Abstract

Distracted driving of a motor vehicle increases a driver's susceptibility to crash involvement. Such driving in the vicinity of highway–rail grade crossings (HRGCs) is especially perilous because the distracted driver may not be aware of the presence of an approaching train. Train-involved motor vehicle crashes invariably cause more severe injuries and greater property damage than other motor vehicle crashes. Because distracted driving at HRGCs is somewhat underresearched, the objectives of this research were to (a) investigate the occurrence of distracted motor vehicle driving at HRGCs, (b) identify characteristics of those distracted motorists, and (c) ascertain empirically factors associated with distracted driving at HRGCs. Data were collected with video recordings at six HRGCs in Nebraska and were statistically analyzed. Results showed that about one-third of drivers observed at HRGCs were distracted. The presence of intersecting roads near the crossings increased distracted driving. Drivers of multiunit trucks at HRGCs were less often distracted than other drivers at HRGCs. The presence of front-seat passengers in vehicles significantly contributed to driver distraction. Findings from the research support the need for driver education about distracted driving at HRGCs. Enforcement of distracted driving laws at HRGCs as well as strengthening of existing laws may also reduce instances of distracted driving at HRGCs.

Getting the Attention of Drivers Back on Passive Railway Level Crossings: Evaluation of Advanced Flashing Lights

“…While drivers tend to look toward the advanced signage on the approach of level crossings, no research has assessed whether the poor driver behavior observed at level crossings is a consequence of a problem of maladaptive behavior (25) with drivers not understanding what they need to do at crossings, or a looked-but-failed-to-see error as suggested by Rudin-Brown et al (10). Tung and Khattak have also shown that distraction is prevalent at railway level crossings in the U.S., reaching 30% on average, and resulting in similar risky approaches at crossings (18). With increasing road and rail traffic volumes, of the order of 35% in recent years in New Zealand for instance (26), the trend of increasing collisions at level crossings is likely.…”

Benchmarking regions using a heteroskedastic grouped random parameters model with heterogeneity in mean and variance: Applications to grade crossing safety analysis

“…With regard to highway-railway grade crossing safety issues, several studies discuss various aspects of crossing safety (Saccomanno et al, 2004;Millegan et al, 2009;Chaudhary et al, 2011;Chadwick et al 2014;Tung et al, 2015;Wang et al, 2016a;Heydari et al, 2016b;Haleem, 2016;Liu and Khattak, 2017;Hsu and Jones, 2017;Sperry et al, 2017;Zhang et al, 2017;Larue et al, 2018;Beanland et al, 2018). Many grade crossing studies can be divided into two categories: (1) crash-frequency studies (Hauer and Persaud, 1987;Austin and Carson, 2002;Saccomanno and Lai, 2005;Park and Saccomanno, 2005;Oh et al, 2006;Yan et al, 2010;Medina and Benekohal, 2015;Heydari and Fu, 2015;Lu and Tolliver, 2016;Heydari et al, 2016a;Heydari et al, 2017b; Guadamuz-Flores and Aguero-Valverde, 2017); and (2) crash-consequence studies (Eluru et al, 2012;Hao et al, 2015;Ghomi et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2018).…”

A Simultaneous Safety Analysis of Crash Frequency and Severity for Highway-Rail Grade Crossings: The Competing Risks Method

“…Most of the previous research studies have focused on roadway intersection or roadway crashes [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Relatively little research effort has focused on HRGC accidents compared to roadway accidents [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. Moreover, among all the previous HRGC accident analyses, the majority of them focus only either on crash frequency, often based on crossing inventory databases [19,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39], or on crash severity analysis, often based on historical crash police report databases [16,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46]…”