CEAT professor focuses on safety while researching highway rail-grade crossings

CEAT professor focuses on safety while researching highway rail-grade crossings

Monday, July 29, 2024

Media Contact: Tanner Holubar | Communications Specialist | 405-744-2065 | [email protected]

Research in the College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering focuses on public safety in all aspects of society.

One research project currently underway with CIVE's Dr. Joshua Li is studying safety around highway-rail grade crossings, or railway crossings that are at the same height as the road they cross.

Li's current research is studying strategies and technology that can aid in warning, detection and prevention of drivers trespassing near highway-rail grade crossings.

Oklahoma has more than 3,475 public, at-grade crossings, and Li said the state ranks in the top 10 in the nation for the number of wrecks at these crossings. Li has been involved in multiple research projects on safety at these crossings, from studying post-accident data, analyzing risk-prone events and near misses to researching simulation-based safety evaluations.

This project is geared toward studying the factor of human behavior and the impact it has on wrecks near highway rail crossings, especially trespassing at these sites.

According to the Federal Rail Administration, 94% of all rail-related fatalities and injuries occur due to trespassing at these crossings. Trespassing also accounts for 70% of all railroad-related deaths, many within 1,000 feet of a highway-rail grade crossing.

Due to crashes at these crossings being sparce, it hasn't been researched heavily. Li said the trend of crashes at these crossings has been going up, even though there is a notable decrease in crashes when there have been new federal standards adopted for safety. He said there is not a consensus for why the number of crashes has been slowly trending up.

"The consequences are more severe compared to highway crashes," Li said. "Of course, we don't want to see the highway crashes,either, but crashes around rail-grade crossings are more severe."

Dr. Joshua Li

The objectives of the research cover many bases. Li's team has reviewed literature from the U.S. and around the world on the safety at these crossings as well as researched the technology and regulations related to safety at highway-rail crossings. His team also conducted an online survey of all 50 state agencies to learn what procedures are in place to prevent trespassing. They've also provided recommendations on those strategies to help improve safety as well as trying to find the root causes of the weaknesses found by the research.

Li said the aspect of studying human behavior in crashes around these crossings is an important factor to research in determining the best safety practices and technologies that are needed.

Previous research on the topic included studying post-accident data at these crossings and identifying the most significant factors to help decision-makers develop and select the most cost-effective engineering solutions. Li has also studied risk-prone events and near misses at highway-rail grade crossings, using video and Light Detection and Ranging to then develop AI-based evaluations using machine vision data.

Li worked with the Oklahoma Department of Transportation to survey the corridor from the Texas border to the Kansas border, the busiest stretch in Oklahoma with about 250 high-way rail grade crossings, to map the profile of the road surface around these crossings.

He said using a data collection vehicle, which can be driven at highway speed, he used laser triangulation to map the profile of the road surface. This allowed the team to study certain types of road profiles with the data of the number of crashes at those locations and make recommendations.

Li said he also wants to study vehicle types that get caught on part of a crossing due to their shape or size.

"Then we can develop some kind of software that is able to know what kind of vehicles could get hung up on the crossing for a certain kind of shape of a road profile," Li said. "So therefore, this information was sent to ODOT, and ODOT can work with Google Maps or some kind of navigation company to put a marker there saying, 'This one could be a problem.'"

Li is now studying driver behavior through simulation-based safety evaluations. He said his team is using computer-aided simulation and traffic simulators equipped with sensors to simulate traffic scenarios and monitor driver responses. This can simulate the effectiveness of proposed solutions before being implemented physically, as well as test emerging technology such as autonomous vehicles.

"Right now, in my lab, I'm trying to get all this set up with the traffic simulator, so that will move another step forward," Li said. "With a video camera or LIDAR sensor, you can see the current condition for an intersection.

"In the simulator, we can simulate the current design and make improvements to see how that will impact when the vehicle approaches these crossings, so we are able to know those deficiencies before we take engineering action or implement strategies to improve them. We can try multiple strategies and prove them in the simulator before implementing improvements."

The research into safety at highway-rail grade crossings has been a multi-tiered approach. The levels range from simple to rigorous, which allows for the team to research the situation from four different angles and come up with a more defined conclusion. He believes this approach was helpful in securing funding for the projects.

"The idea is, because we are engineers, this is applied engineering, so civil engineers want to solve a real problem." Li said. "Our approach is to try to match how the industry, such as the DOT, thinks."

With the ability to study scenarios that improve public safety, Li said this provides benefits to a state or community.

"These projects yield direct benefits, including reduced costs for operating and maintaining infrastructure systems, enhanced infrastructure performance, significant reductions in crashes and overall improvements in transportation safety, which saves lives and reduces traffic congestion," Li said.

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