Efforts to improve safety generally fall into three areas: keeping vehicles off the tracks; alerting drivers when a train is approaching; and, as a last resort, signaling a train operator that a vehicle is on the tracks so that the train can be slowed or stopped.
“Almost all of these accidents happen because a highway user is encroaching on railroad property,” said Aemal Khattak, an associate professor of transportation engineering at the University of Nebraska. “Anything we can do to avoid having the users on those tracks obviously helps.”
The crossing on Commerce Street in Valhalla, where a Metro-North Railroad train collided with a sport-utility vehicle, killing the car’s driver and five train passengers, is what is known as a two-quadrant system — it has barriers across a single lane on either side of the tracks.
