Level crossings
The crossing at Kings Road, Salisbury, South Australia, takes a dual carriageway across three tracks comprising Adelaide metro (broad gauge) and ARTC (standard gauge), and is equipped with full-width barriers and flashing lights. Photos: Mark Carter
be safe,” out of fear of potential litigation if they don’t. The approach of providing barriers as
a precaution may be lauded were it not that in some situations barriers can increase the hazards, for example where queuing over the crossing is highly likely. A descended barrier provides a sense of entrapment to road users who are queuing on a level crossing when a train approaches. In most cases there is no real entrapment, since two-quadrant barriers are overwhelmingly more common than four-quadrant barriers in Australia. Furthermore, most road vehicles can readily break a barrier by simply driving at it. Lastly all Australian barriers can easily be crawled under by a person with any degree of mobility. Nevertheless the sense of entrapment can be very real in the minds of people on a level crossing in the path of an approaching train, and has been a direct cause of a number of fatalities in the past. Barriers can also create hazards where it is highly likely road users want to race in front of a train. On Australia’s expanding network of coal railways, trains can be more than 2km long and travel at 60km/h, which means a coal train can take a minimum of 2 minutes to traverse a level crossing. Adding the 30-second activation time for active warning devices can make road users believe they are being intolerably delayed, tempting some to race in front
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of the train. The presence of barriers in such situations means that road users are spending more time in the path of the train than they otherwise would. It can be argued that the folly of road users who drive around barriers and thereby disobey the law should not be a consideration for railway infrastructure managers. But, freeing managers from the burden of protecting road users from their own errors could be a reason for never installing barriers in the first place.
The major objection to the widespread use of barriers in Australia is economic. The best available data suggests that the number of fatalities at level crossings in Australia with passive warning devices is between three and seven per year. This is an approximate number since the data are not of high quality.
Similarly the cost of installing active warning devices is not easy to determine. Many level crossings in Australia are in very remote areas where there is no active signalling equipment; to install track circuits or axle counters, and provide the very long cable runs necessary to provide power is very expensive. A safety manager of one of Australia’s largest railways estimates that to replace all passive warnings with active warnings would cost about $A 11bn ($US 11.4bn). Whilst the exact number of fatalities at level crossings with passive warnings
in Australia is unclear, I will assume that seven people per year are killed using them. I will also make the unrealistically-optimistic assumption that installation of barriers will completely eliminate all fatalities at level crossings with passive warnings. Hypothetically, if barriers were installed at every passive level crossing at a total cost $A 11bn, each barrier installation had a useful life of 30 years, and the programme resulted in seven fewer fatalities every year, this would be a reduction of 210 fatalities at a cost of more than $A 50m per fatality prevented. But would this be a valuable use of public funds? To provide a comparison of the safety risk that passive level crossings pose in Australia, everyday activities such as getting out of bed or eating dinner kill four and eight times respectively more Australians than are killed at passive level crossings. When considering the danger from more common, and preventable, causes of death such as breast cancer or thyroid disorder it is far from clear whether the very high cost of installing barriers at all level crossings is a justified use of public funds. Clearly barriers would be more cost-
effective if they cost less to install and operate. Modern technology is enabling barriers to be installed for a fraction of the cost of current systems. Using innovative train detection technologies such as solar power supplies, wireless
IRJ December 2012
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