On the fast track to safer railroad crossings

With more than 7,300 miles of railroad tracks, Illinois has the second largest rail system of any state and the second highest number of highway-rail crossings, according to the Illinois Commerce Commission.

Keeping those crossings safe for vehicles and pedestrians is top priority for Illinois Center for Transportation and Illinois Department of Transportation in a joint project, “R27-218: Railroad-Highway Crossing Safety Improvement Evaluation and Prioritization Tool.”

William Pearsall, IDOT’s highway-railway safety engineer, led the project with P.S. Sriraj, Urban Transportation Center director and University of Illinois Chicago adjunct lecturer.

Illinois is home to 7,550 public at-grade highway-rail crossings, where a railroad crosses a roadway at the same level.

To prioritize which crossings to improve, IDOT staff calculate safety benefits using a model based on the frequency of expected crashes.

“We get a lot of federal funding because we are a rail-heavy state, and we want to use it in the best way possible to make crossings safer,” Pearsall said. “That’s where this research comes in: we want to find the best locations to use our federal funding.”

IDOT’s existing model is very oriented toward vehicles, according to Pearsall, which doesn’t allow staff to compare safety benefits between crossings involving only pedestrians and only vehicles.

To determine optimum locations for safety improvements, Sriraj’s team evaluated IDOT’s existing model and prioritization tools for at-grade crossings.

They started by reviewing models and tools used by other state transportation agencies as well as surveying state practices to improve safety at railroad crossings.

Sriraj’s team also monitored 10 at-grade crossings in northeastern Illinois with video.

The videos allowed researchers to study factors affecting the behavior of pedestrians, variation in pedestrian traffic, circuitry behavior, and pedestrian totals before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers also formed two databases from data available from the Illinois Commerce Commission and Federal Railroad Administration.

Sriraj’s team used one of the datasets to evaluate IDOT’s existing model, which underperformed at predicting crashes involving pedestrians.

They developed and tested three alternative models and compared them to the performance of IDOT’s existing model, packaging the best-performing model into an easy-to-use software for IDOT staff to calculate potential safety benefits.

The proposed new formula will allow IDOT personnel to evaluate and compare proposed projects as well as to make better safety-related decisions.

“With those updated formulas and updated numbers, we should get better crash prediction and to be able to compare across different modes of transportation,” Pearsall said. “It’s giving us new numbers and better prediction values for different types of warning devices and locations.”