Most analyses of the need to invest public funds in safety improvements at highway-rail grade crossings focus on preventing fatalities, injuries, and property damage at specific priority locations. However, the comprehensive quantifiable costs of collisions involving a train and one or more motor vehicles at a grade crossing may include substantial property damage incurred by freight shippers as well as the parties to the crash, delivery delay and lost time for traffic that is diverted by the crash, cost of public-service agencies responding to the crash and its aftermath, and more. Little information has been developed about such costs. Lacking such information, highway and rail system decision-makers cannot effectively judge the economic benefits of public investments to improve or eliminate grade crossings. While the number of grade crossing collisions is a small fraction of the number of collisions on the roadway system overall, their impacts are disproportionately large. The literature indicates that grade crossing crashes are much more likely to involve a fatality than other highway crashes. In addition, a grade crossing incident will often have other consequences not typically associated with highway crashes, such as damage to rail equipment and infrastructure; injuries to rail employees and passengers; damage to goods; business interruption; and time spent in public hearings following a collision. The costs are not well documented for several reasons; for example, (1) crash costs are generally incurred by multiple parties who record and report costs differently; (2) concerns for legal liability and litigation risk make railroads reluctant to report publicly their incurred costs of crashes; (3) costs attributable to fatalities, personal injuries, time delays, and other consequences of a crash are not directly observable. Even when costs are observable and reported, wide variance in grade-crossing characteristics–for example, location, geometry, and highway and rail traffic–and the infrequency of grade crossing crashes raise the uncertainty of extrapolations from historic experience to forecasts of potential exposure. The objectives of this research were to develop (a) a categorization scheme for comprehensively describing costs associated with highway-rail grade crossing crashes; (b) estimates of the cost magnitudes in recent experience; and (c) an analytical framework for forecasting these costs at specific locations, considering the characteristics of a crossing and the rail and highway traffic using it. A research team led by DecisionTek, LLC, Rockville, MD, conducted the research. The research team reviewed pertinent current literature and practices on measuring and estimating costs of highway-rail crashes and crash-related traffic interruptions. The team used a variety of information sources to consider the full range of costs that may be incurred by railroads, businesses, public agencies, shippers, passengers, and the public at large. Because of the substantial uncertainties in cost reporting, the team relied substantially on publicly available sources such as records maintained by the Federal Rail Administration and Federal Highway Administration. In addition, the team used recorded costs for fatalities and injuries based on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s definition of the value of a statistical life (VSL), a monetary value attributed to each crash fatality. The VSL is established by the U.S.DOT and updated from time to time to reflect current economic conditions. The U.S.DOT issued guidance increasing the VSL as this research project was nearing completion. Because the costs attributed to fatalities typically are large compared with other costs reported for crashes, the primary consequence of an increase in the VSL is seen in the computations related to crash-cost estimation. This document is written to assist agency staff responsible for identifying and assessing the merits of options to improve safety at highway-rail grade crossings. The report presents the research team’s analysis of available information in a framework designed to facilitate estimation of crash costs that may be incurred at a specific grade crossing characterized by particular geometry and traffic. The framework was used to construct a spreadsheet tool, referenced in the report, which may be used to develop crash-cost estimates. The spreadsheet tool may be downloaded from the TRB website at http://www.trb.org/main/Blurbs/169061.aspx (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting