Abstract
Accidents at highway-rail grade crossings can cause fatalities and injuries, as well as significant property damages. In order to prevent accidents, certain upgrades need to be made at highway-rail grade crossings. However, due to limited monetary resources, only the most hazardous highway-rail grade crossings should receive a priority for upgrading. Hence, accident/hazard prediction models are required to identify the most hazardous highway-rail grade crossings for safety improvement projects. This study selects and evaluates the accident and hazard prediction models found in the highway-rail grade crossing safety literature to rank the highway-rail grade crossings in the State of Florida. Three approaches are undertaken to evaluate the candidate accident and hazard prediction models, including the chi-square statistic, grouping of crossings based on the actual accident data, and Spearman rank correlation coefficient. The analysis was conducted for the 589 highway-rail grade crossings located in the State of Florida using the data available through the highway-rail grade crossing inventory database maintained by the Federal Railroad Administration. As a result of the performed analysis, a new hazard prediction model, named as the Florida Priority Index Formula, is recommended to rank/prioritize the highway-rail grade crossings in the State of Florida. The Florida Priority Index Formula provides a more accurate ranking of highway-rail grade crossings as compared to the alternative methods. The Florida Priority Index Formula assesses the potential hazard of a given highway-rail grade crossing based on the average daily traffic volume, average daily train volume, train speed, existing traffic control devices, accident history, and crossing upgrade records.
Highlights
The intersection of a railway and a roadway is generally referred to as a highway-rail grade crossing
The key assumptions include the following: 1. A given highway-rail grade crossing will be excluded from the analysis if there is a missing value (i.e., “empty cell”) in the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA)’s highway-rail grade crossing accident database and/or the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA’s) highway-rail grade crossing inventory database for a certain predictor which is directly used by a given accident/hazard prediction model
If the FRA’s highway-rail grade crossing inventory database provides “zero” values for certain predictors that are associated with a given highway-rail grade crossing, they will be reset to “1.”
Summary
The intersection of a railway and a roadway is generally referred to as a highway-rail grade crossing. Based on the data reported by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), a total of 47,995 highway-rail accidents were recorded in the United States (U.S.) from January 2000 to December 2018, resulting in 5778 fatalities and 18,752 injuries [7]. During this period, the State of Florida experienced 1649 highway-rail accidents, which involved 268 deaths and 755 injuries [7]. There has been a notable reduction in the number of highway-rail grade crossing accidents since the year of 2008, which may be ascribed to several factors, including: (1) improvements in highway-rail grade crossings’ warning devices; (2) enhanced outreach and education; (3) safer driving behavior; and (4) changes in travel patterns [1]
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