Driver compliance at railway level crossings

Railway level crossings create serious potential conflict points for collisions between road vehicles and trains producing one of the most severe in all traffic crash types. There are approximately 9,400 public railway level crossings in Australia. They are protected either passively (64%) or by active/automated systems (28%). Passive protection systems provide only a stationary sign warning of the possibility of trains crossing. Their message remains constant with time. Active protection systems activate automatic warning devices (i.e., flashing lights, bells, barrier, etc.) as they detect an approaching train. This paper evaluates driver compliance towards different protection systems at railway level crossings. Field data collection using video recording was conducted to measure driver responses at crossings with different protection systems, namely: stop sign, flashing lights/bell and half boom-barrier with flashing lights. This paper describes the field data collection and analysis and subsequently draws conclusions on driver compliance with respect to different types of protection systems. The results indicate that drivers behave differently and are more compliant at actively protected crossings than at passively protected crossings