A Model for Evaluating Countermeasures at Highway-Railway Grade Crossings

Abstract

Current collision prediction models fail to account for the full spectrum of relevant factors affecting the number of collisions at specific Highway-Railway grade crossings. A number of reasons contribute to this failure, including biases in model parameters resulting from collinearity in the model inputs, absence of important variables in the prediction model caused by lack of statistical significance, the inability of models to consider higher-order interactions, and the presence of unexplained variation in the prediction estimates. These problems have compromised the use of collision prediction models in decisions concerning the development and evaluation of cost-effective Safety treatments or counter-measures for application at specific crossings. This paper introduces a stratified collision prediction model for Highway-Railway grade crossings. The development of this model involves three steps: (a) crossing inventory variables are expressed in terms of a limited number of orthogonal (nonlinear) under...