“When I had my Dodge Daytona I got hit by a deer that couldn’t stop on wet pavement. It was the 3rd of three that ran across my route on a 40 MPH roadway - the first two made it, the 3rd one applied his brakes in full service but his hooves didn’t have any grip on the wet pavement and it took out my passenger side mirror. Looking at my rear view mirror I saw it shake its head and stumble along in the direction of its friends.”
In a lot of PA, the 2nd most cause of car accidents is deer either running into cars or being hit by them. In some of the most rural counties it can be the #1 cause. Around where I live, deer help keep the auto repair shops pretty busy. I had one run into the side of my car, cause $3,500 of damage, and ran off without showing any sign of injury. While my car was being fixed, I was riding in my girl friend’s car in a built-up area only to have a massive buck jump a guard rail and come down on her hood. He immediately took off, again jumped the guard rail without any problem, ran away between the buildings, and caused $3,500 of damage. Fortunately, deer vs vehicle accidents in PA fall under the Comprenhensive Auto Insurance coverage so they don’t have a claims impact on your premium.
I don’t know the numbers for NY, but I’m sure they are similar, espcially in northern parts of the state. I almost got one a couple of nights ago myself.
I was out with my fire department the other morning for - (wait for it) - a car/deer collision. Folded the hood up pretty good.
The sheriff’s deputy who responded said it was the fourth or fifth they’d been to during their midnight shift.
You could fence off the road and build grade separated wildlife crossings. Most of the Trans-Canada Highway through Banff National Park is like this, and it seems to work.
I shudder to think of how much it would cost on a national level.
Would that be like the person who called up the highway department and asked them to take down the “deer crossing” signs, as the deer crossing there were a problem…
That doesn’t follow logically from what he way saying at all.
What he was pointing out is an example of what right-wingers might term ‘nanny-state enablement’: the idea that any real railroad crossing would have ‘government’ signs, lights, and gates and that if it were important there would surely be lights.
And quite probably the idea that if a train actually hits them at an ‘unprotected’ crossing they can sue for large money damages because someone should have given them warning. I already see people thinking that crossings without gates are less important than those with half-gates, and those in turn less serious than full four-gate crossings with little arms for the sidewalks and baffles for the bike traffic.
I think Jeff noted another problem: People are paranoid about police enforcement of things like ‘California roll’ stops, but have the perception that they wouldn’t be ticketed for running a crossing because that’s a private company’s affair. I confess that I accept that such mentality is likely to exist, and that it is somewhat behind my preferred alternative of sensor-fused cameras, multiple-hundred-dollar fines and suspensions where justified for repeat offenders – in fact, all the expedient legal enforcement machinery built up for “drunk drivers” applied to a similarly dangerous social concern.
The crossing in question has an interesting inversion - rather than a less-used rail line on a busy highway, which would have lights and gates in most cases, we have a little used road on a busy rail line.
And most of that limited number of vehicle crossings had probably, for years, be local folks familiar with it. That concept has been alluded to here.
It will be interesting to see what the final solution to this particular hazard will be.
I said that active crossings make passive crossing more dangerous. In other words if you made all active crossings into passive crossings, the crossings that were passive all along would suddenly be less dangerous. But this is just to demonstrate a principle, and not something I suggest doing. In fact if it were actually done, it would made the passive crossings safer, but make the previously active crossings more dangerous.
I started to explain this in a reply to Charlie, but I think it got too confusing, so I took it down for some remodeling. It is not an easy thing to explain. But the basic idea is that if all crossings suddenly were passive, drivers would no longer be lulled into a false sense of security by the automatic protection of active crossings.
But the point was to be directed at the idea of making passive crossings safer by adding active protection to them, and to do this at a lower cost than that of a typical new active crossing installation. This is what Greyhounds was suggesting in the other post. This is also what the Minnesota project was attempting to do. I will explain this better later.
Well, there I thought I was defending the point he was making, only to find I seem to have misconstrued what he actually thought he was meaning to say at the time. (/s)
I do think it is likely that many, perhaps most people will assume that a road crossing will have lights and gates on an active line, and tend to ‘stop, look, and listen’ less at passive crossings because if a train were likely to be there, the government would have mandated the familiar ‘active railroad crossing’ paraphernalia.
In my opinion a good low-cost system needs to reinforce the necessity to STOP, LOOK, LISTEN at any crossing – and to note in its signage when it is across a busy or highly active … or high-speed… line. (The Milwaukee, along with those famous ‘slow to 90mph’ signs, had a somewhat terrifying notice about ‘high speed trains’ on some of the unsignaled crossings…)
Part of the long-term solution is to do as the Canadians are doing with their ‘attention alert’ tones (and Holley Rudd did successfully with the alternate-flashing crossing signal): develop signage,approaches, etc. that reinforce public understanding that one is vigilant and thoughtful at any specially marked crossing, as a subconscioudly active response. Terror and mandates are a poor, even though somewhat effective, way to build that kind of instinctive compliance. Alternatives welcome.
There’s a wildlife overpass crossing US-101 between Augora and Thousand Oaks. I’d also shudder at how much it would cost on a national basis, though I would think the installations would most likely be where “wilderness” areas existed on both sides of a major highway.
Wildlife is everywhere and while you can build structures for them to cross highways and railroads - you have difficulties in ‘instructing’ them to use those structures; at least without serious fencing.
Went to the hardware store yesterday afternoon - ‘startled’ a doe and two fawns less than a mile from my house.
Have several videos of deer that have been browsing around my driveway and back yard - the back yard is enclosed in your everyday chain link fence.
Two fellows were bragging about their hunting dogs. One claimed his could follow a year’s old track. Of course, the reply was, “show me.”
So the first fellow gives his dog the command to seek out a track. Soon the dog yelps and sets off on a run across a field. About half way across the field, the dog suddenly jumps straight up in the air, then resumes tracking.
“See, told you!,” says the dog’s owner.
“What does that prove?”
“Some years ago there was a six foot page wire fence there…”
A local farm here raises deer - their fences are plenty tall.
Although it should be clearly recognized that even a level 4 vehicle without external sensor fusion or inputs might suffer precisely this sort of accident in this way.
Perhaps sensitive microphone arrays would provide earlier directional warning of ‘train noise’, but no arrangement of cameras would have picked up motion ‘through the trees’ with sufficient lead time. Nor could the systems providing vehicle control give a response time faster than the laws of physics permit.
A simple tie-in with PTC information or cheap roadside cameras with better sightlines solves this… when everything is working perfectly. I would note that the original Carnegie-Mellon approach of tying into GIS to optimize energy consumption and navigation lends itself to relatively secure grade-crossing alerts that won’t compromise business intelligence (or necessarily facilitate expedient harvesting) but this goes away if onboard-stored GIS is in use. I suspect there was limited high-speed wireless data access in that accident location, and while it might be practical to implement some kind of femtocell coverage at these sorts of crossing, I suspect it could not be cheap and might be difficult to make robust or theft/vandalproof.
Of course a properly-designed level-4-autonomous vehicle would take better note of signage and, if properly programmed, recognize the crossing from ‘tercom’ and use properly conservative action to negotiate it… and realize whether its vehicle will high-center or stall in the effective foul zone.
You are right. An electronic signal from PTC loco to appropriate vehicle systems would be more effective than blowing its horn, which is an archaic, 19th c. method.
Safety is more important than “business intelligence” which is often an oxymoron, much the same as PSR.
So - blowing the horn will activate what ever electronic counter measures become STANDARDIZED, just like blowing the horn activates the ditch lights and the bell.
Now how high and wide and what should be the strength of the electronic counter measures ‘beam’ be?
Deer have no problem clearing a 6’ fence. A backyard chain link fence would be a breeze to clear for deer.
I hit a small doe years back on I-75 up in Mt Morris, MI. It must been about 7’ in the the air when it landed in front of me. After leaping over the center barrier which is about 48" in height. Ended up blasting it at 70. $8000 worth of damage to the front end of my vehicle… Thank goodness for insurance…
When the CHI-STL UP/Amtrak line was upgraded to higher speed (up to 110 mph), by the end of 2017, they made major safety upgrades at 203 grade crossings by installing four-quadrant gates and loop detectors to detect vehicles on the tracks when trains are approaching. In addition, 39 crossings were permanently closed.
Regarding my point on the preceding page as follows in blue:
“So, it follows that every active grade crossing today makes every passive grade crossing more dangerous than it would be if all crossings were passive. This is because drivers have become habituated to relying on the maximum protection of the flashing lights, bells, and gates of active crossings, which lowers their wariness accordingly. Then with that habitual state of lowered wariness, they apply that to passive crossings. Primarily they forget the need to look for trains.”
It is true that eliminating all crossing active protection would eliminate this disparity, but it is not a practical solution because it would reduce current protection provided by active crossings.
It would make the passive crossing less dangerous but make the active crossings more dangerous. I would expect the net result would be that the increase of danger of active crossings would far outweigh the decrease in danger of passive crossings. One reason would be that active protection is already provided for the most dangerous crossings in terms of train and vehicle traffic counts plus other external factors.