Pedestrian distraction at railway level crossings: Can illuminated in-ground LEDs attract their attention back?

One major contributor to pedestrian risk of injury and death at railway level crossings in Australia and New Zealand are road users who are complacent, distracted or inattentive. Such users can either intentionally or unintentionally travel through a railway crossing, without looking first for oncoming trains. Increased use of mobile devices increases the prevalence of pedestrian distraction and tends to reduce the effectiveness of warning devices installed at level crossings. A potential innovative solution to combat this issue is to use in-ground LED visual warning devices. However, there is currently no evaluation of the safety improvements obtained from such an intervention. This research evaluated pedestrians’ eye gaze behaviour toward illuminated in-ground LEDs while conducting a distractive task with a mobile device or headphones. We conducted a laboratory study (N=20) where participants equipped with an eye tracker had to detect the activation of lights on the floor or on the wall under various distraction conditions. We found that such intervention could be very effective in attracting the attention of distracted pedestrians, even when participants looked at the screen of their phone, as they mainly used peripheral vision during this detection task. The Australasian Centre for Rail Innovation (ACRI) is now partnering with KiwiRail to trial such an intervention in the field at passively protected level crossings