San Francisco Bike Blog

Last Monday, October 6, a Caltrain smashed into the back end of a tractor trailer. The trailer illegally tried to cross the train tracks as the train was approaching. The truck driver suffered minor injuries, and nobody else sustained any injuries. We got lucky. Trains were delayed in both directions for about two hours, and there were expected, smaller ripple delays.

The driver will have to pay $15K in damages.

Why did it happen, and how do we prevent this?

The UC-Berkeley Traffic Safety Center studies these things. Their Spring 2008 newsletter was titled ‘The Safety Run-Around That Happens at Rail Crossings‘:

[Researcher Doug] Cooper has been studying rail crossing safety for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) as part of the TSC’s rail crossing safety research program. “In California, we have approximately 7,700 public at-grade railroad crossings.” About 40 percent of them have gates, but, discouragingly for safety advocates, gate-protected crossings is where 73 percent of the nearly 600 train-vehicle crashes from 2000 to 2004 occurred.

For some drivers, the lowered crossing gates seem like more of a yellow light - try to speed through before it goes red. I understand this compulsion - I’ve definitely felt it. I don’t remember if I ever did it during my driving days. This most recent collision is Burlingame resulted in minor injuries to one person, but that’s not always the case:

On a more serious note, two videos captured fatal collisions. In one, a car drives around the lowered gates and is hit by a train, killing four young people inside.

The other shows a car driving down a street that is blocked by a train crossing at the end of the block. The car turns left through a parking lot so that it is running parallel to the train, in essence, racing the train to the next crossing. The driver, a woman, is winning the race.

Cooper narrated the next sequence: “Unfortunately, there’s another train coming from the other direction. She’s got four kids in the car. When she starts her slight swing left to exit the parking lot, you can see the other train coming. She starts her hard right hand turn and doesn’t see that train at all, she’s looking at the one she’s racing. So the second train hits her, knocks her into the first, the one she was actually racing. As I mentioned, there were four kids in the car: two girls that were not strapped in, two boys that were. The mother was not strapped in. The three females were ejected. The two girls died immediately. The mother died about a week later. The boys survived; they were hurt but they survived.”

The images, Cooper said, “serve as a reminder of why we are here today and what we are trying to do.”

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) produced this little video animation describing the Leibowitz Hypothesis, which says that humans are very bad at judging the speed of oncoming large objects. The video is not narrated, but after watching it you may get the same feeling as I did - ‘Yeah - it does kinda work like that, dunnit? Those things do sneak up on ya pretty quick.’

What’s the best solution? Or, what solution gives us ‘the most bang for the buck’? Median separators.

Other options are outlined in Cooper’s paper: long-arm gates that cover at least three-quarters of the roadway, media separators, four-quadrant gates and photo enforcement.

Of the four, long-arm gates and media separators seem the most practical for a variety of reasons. Long-arm gates are effective, but there are limits on where they can be located, and maintenance and installation costs could be high.

Median separators would be one way to prevent drivers from going around lowered gates without incurring high costs.

Median separators are less costly and more adaptable to different settings (though transportation agencies in snowy climates have encountered difficulties in snow-clearing when they are installed). They cost about one-tenth of the more expensive treatments.

They consist of mountable centerline medians with channelization devices that can be applied directly to the existing roadway, often without requiring street widening, or can be added as part of a more complex structure consisting of an island with reflectors mounted on the top. Such systems present drivers with a visual impediment to crossing into the opposing traffic lane yet are designed to allow emergency vehicles to cross over.

“There are always going to be people who will make bad decisions at rail-highway crossings, Cooper said. If we can’t eliminate gate-running completely, then the key is to make it more difficult to cross the tracks when it’s not safe to do so, and the low-tech median separator would be a good start.

The railroad median separator picture is from Qwick Kurb, Inc.

I don’t know how much the cuts to transit funding may impede implementation of safety measures like these.

[Update:] I had originally written this post this past weekend and had it schedule to run Wednesday, tomorrow, but now I figure it’s best to run it as soon as possible. Cyclelicious has coverage on the recent pedestrian fatality - which is not the tractor trailer incident described above. Initial coverage from the incident, sourced from Caltrain Tweets information, here. We’ll have to do more research on pedestrians trying to beat the train. I know I’ve done it before, and it’s probably even more tempting than when you’re sitting in a car, so I feel like this could happen to anymore. Scary. Condolences to friends and family of the victim.

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