1 – Abbas K. A. Ghareib A. H. and Wahdan A. H. (2009) Safety Modeling and Improvement of Railroad Grade Crossings in Egypt. Advances in Transportation Studies: An International Journal. University of Rome, Rome, Italy. Under Publication.
2 – Abbas K. A. Ghareib A. H. and Wahdan A. H. (2003) Development of Safety Proxy Models for Railroad Grade Crossings in Greater Cairo. In Proceedings of 6th World Congress on Railway Research (WCRR 2003: From Birth to Renaissance), Session: Human Factors, pp. 301-317. Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Abstract:
The paper starts by presenting a generic conceptualization of factors affecting safety of railroad grade crossings. This is followed by classification of different types of railroad grade crossings. Probabilistic safety models are developed, where accidents occurring at railroad grade intersections are defined as an outcome of a collision between a train and a vehicle(s) or a collision between a train and a pedestrian(s). The research develops statistical models that relate crossing safety at railroad crossings, represented by the potentiality of accident occurrence, to exposure parameters such as vehicle and pedestrian flows. The potentiality of accident occurrence is being expressed in terms of crossing violations whether vehicle and/or pedestrian violations. Five functional forms were utilized, namely linear, power, logarithmic, exponential and quadratic polynomial. To establish goodness of fit and statistical significance of the calibrated models two statistical indicators were computed namely the R2 and the F-statistic. A total of 50 statistical models were calibrated. The power function was the most dominant. The paper concludes by proposing a package of countermeasures that is meant to improve the traffic safety conditions at railroad grade crossings. Such package includes ten categories, namely organizational, education, training, mass-media, train related, evaluation, engineering and maintenance, regulatory, enforcement, and intelligent transport systems.
