(The following article by Daryl Farnsworth was posted on the Modesto Bee website on December 6.)
MODESTO, Calif. — There have been 25 crashes, several of them fatal, between vehicles and trains at railroad crossings in Stanislaus County since 1992, according to the California Highway Patrol.
“There have been train vs. vehicle accidents at crossings all over the county,” CHP spokesman Tom Killian said. “All crossings can be dangerous.”
Several pedestrians crossing railroad tracks also have been fatally hit by trains, he said.
Nationwide, trains collide with vehicles more than 3,000 times a year, killing more than 300 people.
Nearly every grade-crossing accident, such as when a driver tries to go around the warning gate, is blamed on driver stupidity.
In fact, it is a lot more complicated than that.
Scientists say that many of these accidents are caused by deadly misperceptions, the visual and behav- ioral quirks known to science but not to ordinary drivers. And making rail-crossing encounters even more treacherous are train and crossing designs that fail to take into account how people perceive and behave.
It’s not enough to stop, look and listen at railroad crossings, these experts warn, because what you think you see can kill you.
“The attitude of the Federal Railroad Administration is that almost every accident that ever happened at a railroad crossing is the driver’s fault,” said cognitive psychologist Marc Green, a partner in the Toronto consulting firm Visual Expert.
One peculiarity of human perception is that large objects in motion appear to be moving more slowly than they really are.
Herschel Liebowitz, emeritus professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University, first described the size-speed effect and other grade-crossing perils in 1985. Liebowitz field-tested his theories by riding in the cab of a locomotive and questioning railroad personnel: “It was almost immediately obvious what the problem was. People misestimated the speed of trains.”
Fooled by vanishing point
The problem is compounded by perspective.
When people look down a railroad track, they don’t see the rails, or the telephone poles running along the tracks, as parallel. They see them converging in the distance at what artists and scientists call the vanishing point. As Liebowitz explains, people have learned to associate that apparent convergence with distance, and so we are likely to assume that the train is farther away than it is.
For these reasons, the railroad industry is working with law enforcement on the Operation Life-saver safety program, Killian said.
The program is designed to increase motorists’ and pedestrians’ awareness of the law pertaining to railroad crossings and to save lives, Killian said. It includes the larger-looks-slower phenomenon and the perspective illusion in its literature and reminds drivers and those
tempted to take their chances on railroad tracks that trains need a long time to stop.
“We know that the problem is (that) there are just too many impatient drivers who fail to obey traffic regulations at either active or passive crossings,” said Warren Flatau, a spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration.
Drivers can stop quickly or steer out of the way, but train operators can’t, Modesto police Detective Doug Ridenour said.
“People need to realize that they’re not dealing with another car, but a train, and it goes straight and it can’t turn to miss you and it can’t slow down or stop quickly,” Ridenour said.
“If you see a train, be patient and don’t attempt to cross the tracks when the lights are on and the bells are sounding and the arms are down.”
Records show that the United States has made progress in train safety, with railroad crossing deaths down from 786 in 1975 to 315 in 2001.
Experts believe the dramatic reduction in deadly accidents largely stems from the government’s rail-highway crossings program, which since 1978 has injected $4 billion into crossing improvements.
Gates, flashing lights help
The elimination of thousands of grade crossings and the increase in so-called active crossings, especially in heavily populated areas, have been important advances. Twenty years ago, only about 50,000 of the country’s 225,000 public grade crossings were protected by flashing lights, bells and-or gates that drop when a train is about to pass. Today, there are about 62,000 of these active crossings out of 154,000 total.
There are two kinds of railroad crossings — private and public. Private crossings are not required to have signs leading up to them or other markings and they are found on roads not maintained by a public author-ity.
At public rail crossings, there are two types of warnings: passive signs and active warning signs, such as flashing lights or flashing lights with gates.
The purpose of the signs is to get the driver’s attention and get the driver to slow or stop at the crossing, look in both directions and listen for an approaching train.
It is the driver’s responsibility to control the vehicle safely and stop as required by law.
Union Pacific says that in most states, motor vehicle laws concerning crossings read: When any person driving a vehicle approaches a railroad grade crossing and signals indicate an approaching train, the driver of the vehicle shall stop within 15 feet of the nearest track and shall not proceed until it is safe.
The Federal Railroad Administration is examining why drivers behave dangerously at grade crossings, an important first step. And it is studying “intelligent transportation systems” that would warn train personnel, or even stop the train, when a vehicle or person is on the tracks.