FL9AC wrote:Natural selection is the answer...can't fix stupid just thin the herd. If everyone paid more attention and dusted off that common sense....this stuff wouldn't happen but with smart devices and technology making life easier, it's also making people stupid. Crossings have been the same design basically for a long time...why must they be redesigned?
Yeah. There's no adjustment that can be made for the stupidity that's affected all of driverkind in the cell phone era. You can fine the everloving crap out of drivers caught texting (and many states have), you can build hands-free cell controls and voice commands into every new car (and most carmakers have), and electronics addiction still overpowers it all. There is nothing you can physically do to a crossing to upgrade it in a way that outpaces the decline in driver attention span. Maybe the
acceleration of that decline in attention span is starting to level off now that smartphones are pretty much as uniquitous as they're ever going to get, but actually catching up with better crossing technology to how much attention span has declined since the mid-90's is impossible and out-of-reach.
The only thing you can really do to measurably improve safety is to close (close...not separate) every crossing that has no reason to exist. Then do the best you can with crossing protection on the ones that have to exist: quadrant gates, those plastic road dividers and high-visibility signage/paint markings, early-warning sensors, and signal preemption for queue management where possible. Maybe even balancing the quiet zone needs with audio warning someone wearing earbuds in the car can hear with those wayside horns like they're installing on the Springfield Line in Wallingford...where it sounds like a real train horn but has a very narrow sound profile that dissipates quickly outside the immediate crossing area. And definitely a lot stricter shared responsibility with DOT's and town DPW's to improve road safety around the crossings: trimming trees and installing lighting around poor sightlines, widening excessively narrow pavement where possible within X feet of the crossing so drivers have more room to quickly back out/around if they get stuck, straightening roads where possible to be perpendicular to the crossing instead of at bad angles with pronounced blind spot. Then just deal with the remaining risk as a fact of life and fact of fate. It'll have been mitigated down significantly enough for the rest of chance and stupidity to be a tolerable trade-off.
I don't see a whole lot of shared responsibility being proposed here when Blumenthal, Cuomo, and Schumer open their respective big, bigger, and biggest mouths. They are still not willing to lock horns with the villages who won't allow the 3 or 4 most unnecessary of these 9 Harlem Line crossings to get
outright jersey-barriered out of existence. They're focusing exclusively on crossing protection and not the DOTs' and DPWs' responsibility to improve the wretched sightlines and constrained/little-margin-for-error road surfaces at these crossings. You still have insanity in CT at town-control streets where the towns have total carte blanche to
disable state-installed signal preemption when some idiot selectman wants to save 5 seconds off his speed-trap commute home, as happened at one of the insanely dangerous Springfield Line + busway crossings in West Hartford. They won't give the road half of this equation a responsibility to do their share; the railroad ends up bearing all the cost. And so there's plenty of lower-traffic but still quite dangerous crossings out there that are subsisting on no early warning signage or paint on the pavement, no tree-trimming around obscured crossbucks, no active protection whatsoever, godawful road sightlines that haven't improved in 100 years, and a blame game that the RR should shoulder all liability. When it gets that cheap and petty it hurts the smallest of shortlines too, not just the commuter rails.
Spoiled suburban car drivers are still the vote-pander demographic that rules here. And until some of these pols get brave enough to start empowering some centralized state control over all modes to initiate action at problem crossings, nothing is going to substantially change. "Jetsons @#$%" crossing protection doesn't help when towns want to be crossing protection NIMBY's on their town-control roads (and even state-control roads when their Legislators nix improvements) when that 5-second head start is non-negotiable. And, really, the outward sign that nothing's going to change is how little talk there's been by any elected official at pursuing closures of unnecessary crossings. Not here where a third of these Harlem electric zone crossings could get closed off tomorrow at zero ill effect. And definitely not in the CDOT land of whimsy where all those easy NEC eliminations got declared 'aesthetically hands-off' even when there was boatloads of fed money available to take care of three-quarters of them. And where things as basic as signal preemption turns into World War III between levels of government.
