4.0 Key Takeaways

The most acute problems in railroad safety are with trespassing and grade crossing incidents, but most federal focus is on train accidents and crashes not at grade crossings.

Existing federal policy on rail safety has largely been successful. Dramatic declines in train crashes and safer workplaces for employees are the direct result in the rules, regulations, and mandates like PTC. Aside from addressing some specific issues such as persistent derailments in yards, significant further improvement will be challenging without immense expense.

On the other hand, trespassing and grade crossing incidents are trending in the wrong direction. Together these make up only 28 percent of total railroad safety incidents, but they comprise 97 percent of all deaths on the railroads.

While some federal policies and grant programs exist, more federal action is warranted in addressing the persistent and growing problems related to grade crossings and trespassing. For example, of the 19 most wanted and other recommendations from the NTSB, only two are tangentially related to grade crossings and trespassing. The federal grant programs directly addressing grade crossings and trespassing are relatively small.

Addressing railroad safety will require a tailored approach.

Part of the problem in crafting the next phase of railroad safety will be the fact that the conditions affecting safety on the railroad network vary from state to state and from railroad to railroad. California, Texas, and Florida all have significant problems with grade crossings and trespassing, even when controlling for population and rail traffic. Meanwhile, other states like Michigan and New Jersey have a fraction of the national average for incidents involving trespassing and grade crossings, respectively. Amtrak and short line railroads have above average incident rates at grade crossings and trespassing deaths, which often happen on host railroad infrastructure. Conversely, train derailments and crashes tend to happen more often on freight railroads than passenger railroads.

Part of the problem in addressing railroad safety is that the issues surrounding suicide, homelessness, poverty, despair, addiction, road design and the like are broader societal issues that go beyond the ability of transportation professionals and policymakers concerned solely with transportation to fix. The next phase of federal railroad safety policy will need to both extend beyond railroading and acknowledge its relationship to other societal issues and also require a more discrete approach involving finding the problem areas and addressing them in the local context.

Many grade crossing and trespassing incidents can be addressed using combined education, enforcement, and engineering approaches.

The statistics on factors influencing the frequency and severity of grade crossing crashes presented in Section 3 tend to suggest that efforts to prevent collisions between trains and road vehicles at grade crossings, or to make them less severe when they do occur, should be less focused on upgrading warning devices (which is where the bulk of federal and state money devoted to grade crossing safety currently goes) and more focused on educational and engineering efforts to deter risky behavior and redesign or eliminate the types of crossings that have been shown to be more dangerous.

Research on best practices for designing roads to slow traffic and force motorists to pay more attention to their surroundings, for example, could be instructive for designing safer roadway approaches to grade crossings. Educational efforts should be targeted toward younger drivers, particularly men. And while there is no way to control for weather conditions, installing warning lights before crossings that activate during poor weather, installing lighting at strategic points near crossings, and clearing vegetation and other obstructions to motorists’ view of oncoming trains could all help mitigate these factors.

One area where it would make sense to further develop and deploy active warning devices is in protecting pedestrians at grade crossings and at designated pedestrian-only crossings, such as at train stations or along multi-use trails. While pedestrians were involved in only 9 percent of accidents at public crossings in 2017, almost 40 percent of fatal grade crossing collisions that year involved pedestrians. Possible mitigation measures include installing additional gates blocking sidewalks and ‘gate skirts’ that make it harder for pedestrians to duck under lowered gates. The FHWA also says that bells or other auditory signals are more effective at warning pedestrians and bicyclists than at warning motorists.

Similarly, localities and railroads need to pay more attention to urban design and needs of pedestrians that might be crossing tracks. Better siting of facilities near safe crossings, more pedestrian-focused warnings, and safe pedestrian crossings in areas with high rates of walking across tracks to get to specific destinations would all have a positive impact. Making it easy to cross tracks and less appealing to linger near them might also reduce loitering and graffiti.

More research is needed to determine the outcomes and costs of existing and new policies and treatments.

This research found that many states, law enforcement groups, universities, and localities are piloting innovative approaches to tackle problems associated with trespassing and grade crossings. While anecdotally these programs might be achieving their intended goals, data that quantify how much they cost and how much they reduced specific incidents are often not recorded or reported. Similarly, it was difficult to find any information about the standard costs of grade crossing gates, fencing, and other signals that have been deployed to reduce grade crossings.