Investigation of factors that affect traffic law violations at rail-highway crossings

Traffic crashes at rail-highway crossings, although small in number as compared to any other highway situation, pose a serious safety hazard in both rural and urban areas. Driver violations of traffic control devices at rail-highway crossings are significant, and can be an indirect measure to represent relative hazardousness of specific situations in lieu of crashes which are rare and often catastrophic.;This study of driver behavior at rail-highway crossings investigated the possible association between the past crash histories and violations. The study utilized videotaping driver behavior at 37 rail-highway crossing sites. On an average, approximately 3.5 days of data collection for around 2 hours per day was performed at each site. Along with videotaping, manual observation of license plate numbers for violating vehicles, driver gender, approximate age, and the vehicle make and model were also performed. Data on vehicle ownership was also collected and used to perform a questionnaire survey to obtain more details on the violating drivers.;Driver violations were categorized into five different levels of severity ranging from routine to critical. Thirty seven sites were then subdivided into four groups based on crossing geometry and traffic control. The sites were also classified based on the land use in the proximity of the rail-highway crossing.;Seven-year crash data for the study sites were then collected and group averages were calculated for significance testing. Observed violation data for the same groups were calculated and tests for statistical significance and a test of association between violations and crashes were performed on them as well.;The results of the study indicated promise for the use of the violation data in determining the relative hazardousness of rail-highway crossings in combination with crash histories. It was found that drivers tend to violate at sites with more traffic control devices such as gated rail-highway crossings as compared to the ones that had flashers only. It was also found that there is no direct association between violations and crashes. The lack of enforcement, a poor assessment of risk, and opportunities provided by two-quadrant gates and four-lanes roads, resulted in an increased volume of violations. The violation data was also used to develop countermeasures which would help alleviate violations and eventually traffic crash problems at rail-highway crossing sites.