Stay Safe at Level Crossings: New safety campaign

Cookie_Monster wrote: »

Why is this such a big, ongoing issue in Ireland? There seems to always be a campaign on it and lots of money spent gating every crossing, what's the need?
Here's a normal railway crossing in NZ, outside the heavy commuter routes of course where barriers etc are needed.
http://goo.gl/maps/z13Dh

Cheap and cheerful, most don't even have lights on them and yet it works perfectly fine

I would have thought that the answer to your question was contained in the link to the Irish Rail website. 96 near misses in 3 years is a hell of a lot.

I would rather the authorities take a pro-active approach rather than merely a reactive one.

Cookie_Monster wrote: »

Why is this such a big, ongoing issue in Ireland? There seems to always be a campaign on it and lots of money spent gating every crossing, what's the need?
Here's a normal railway crossing in NZ, outside the heavy commuter routes of course where barriers etc are needed.
http://goo.gl/maps/z13Dh

Not to offend New Zealanders or anything, but NZ's raid safety record is generally regarded as poor by the standards of other developed countries. In particular it's poor compared to Ireland's, with deaths in railway accidents running at between three and four times the Irish rate.

A good deal of this is put down to historical low standards of railway construction with, e.g., narrow-guage railway running alongside busy roads with inadequate separation, a large proportion of level crossings with a correspondingly small proportion of separated crossings (bridges) and, yes, a high proportion of unguarded level crossings.

So, yes, there is a problem in New Zealand. It's just that New Zealanders are used to the problem, so it no longer spooks them. Plus, they're stuck with it, since solving the problem would require either massive realignment of railways, or massive realignment of roads that run near railways, and the rail business in NZ just doesn't generate the kind of revenue which would allow for that expenditure.

gobnaitolunacy wrote:

I remember the Kiwis having a weird level crossing - a sort of road/rail shared bridge at one location. H & S on this hemisphere wouldn't have that in a million years.

they have / had several
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_road-rail_bridges#New_Zealand
the below is probably the msot notable, though has been replaced, the rails still run right through the roundabout...
http://www.kiwirail.co.nz/projects/completed-projects/arahura-bridge.html

Peregrinus wrote: »

So, yes, there is a problem in New Zealand. It's just that New Zealanders are used to the problem, so it no longer spooks them. Plus, they're stuck with it, since solving the problem would require either massive realignment of railways, or massive realignment of roads that run near railways, and the rail business in NZ just doesn't generate the kind of revenue which would allow for that expenditure.

And a lack of H&S hysteria that's gripped all of Europe as well I reckon.

Kiwirail make 2.5 times the revenue of IE and actually make a profit too, $77m in 2011/12 so could easily set funds aside for it if it were warranted, though at the same time had plenty of write downs. Unlike IE it's predominantly revenue generating freight that keeps it going.

lxflyer wrote:

I would have thought that the answer to your question was contained in the link to the Irish Rail website. 96 near misses in 3 years is a hell of a lot.
I would rather the authorities take a pro-active approach rather than merely a reactive one.

where does it end though? All this should be covered in driving tests and that should be enough, but Irish people's complete disregard for the law always seems to come back into stuff like this, same for speeding, running lights etc. Its the same thing with having to have ads to remind people to indicate or how to use a motorway or roundabout, it's crazy that these things are actually required in Ireland!

Cookie_Monster wrote: »

Kiwirail make 2.5 times the revenue of IE and actually make a profit too, $77m in 2011/12 so could easily set funds aside for it if it were warranted, though at the same time had plenty of write downs. Unlike IE it's predominantly revenue generating freight that keeps it going.

Gosh, Cookie_Monster, NZ$77m doesn't realign a lot of track away from roads, or build many bridges. In terms of upgrading NZ rail infrastructure to European standards, you're off by an order of magnitude - and then some. Kiwirail is currently in the middle of a NZ$750m investment programme (over three years), and that's not buying any new bridges at all, or realigning any track away from roads, or reducing the number of level crossings. If you want to do these things, you're talking much, much more money. But you would have to do these things to reduce rail fatalities to European levels.

Realistically, the choice facing New Zealanders is (a) work with the rail infrastructure they have inherited, and tolerate a safety record which, while broadly acceptable to New Zealanders, is poor by international comparison, and not one which other countries seek to emulate, or (b) drastically reduce the rail network, retaining only such lines as can be upgraded to European-type safety standard out of the revenue they generate.

Cookie_Monster wrote: »

my point was simply it would pay for a lot of barriers and lights / jingly bells on crossings if they though they were warranted. I was not suggesting major rebuilds either here or in Ireland to solve minor issues.

I don't suppose you have a comparison of deaths per rail km per country or similar to back any of that up, I've had a search around but nothing obvious presents itself.

All I can find online is this:

https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/36819/rail_int_comparison.pdf

Table 2 gives annual railway accident death rates per 100,000 of the population from 1980 to 1990 for OECD countries.

The NZ rate is markedly higher than the Irish rate, though I agree this isn't all down to safety issues; it also reflects the fact that New Zealand has more railways overall - more than twice as much, by length of track. Plus, NZ has a high proportion of freight services which, obviously, can't give rise to passenger deaths but tend to present a greater risk to non-rail users.

But I think it's also conceded that it's down to design features. The decision was taken in 1870 that the entire network would be narrow-gauge - 3ft 6in. This enables much tighter curves than standard gauge, which in turn make it more feasible to construct railways alongside existing roads, which was a particularly cheap way of constructing them.

But this has two consequences. First, road and rail tend to be on a level so, where they cross, a bridge is less likely to be feasible. Secondly, you have a high proportion of level crossings at road junctions - a road user approaching a main road with a parallel railway has to cross the rail tracks just before entering the main road (or a road user leaving the main road does so just after leaving). Both of these lead to a lot more mixing of road and rail traffic than might be considered optimal. Add to that that the speed of road traffic now, since motorization, is very much higher that it was when these level crossings were laid out, and you have problems like lines of sight which are perfectly tolerable for road traffic going at 10 or 15 km/h, but not so hot for traffic going at 50 km/h.

It all adds up to a historic problem which can only be thoroughly resolved by realigning railways away from road, or vice versa, both of which are very expensive.

The bottom line is that we learn here . . .

http://www.railsafety.co.nz/facts/rail-safety-statistics

. . . that New Zealand averages 24 train/car collisions at level crossings each year, while we learn here:

http://www.rsc.ie/download/pdf/11296_rsc_annual_report_2011_eng_2_col.pdf

. . . that Ireland has between 0 and 4 such collisions each year. From the table there I calculate the annual average over ten years at 2.1.

New Zealand does have more level crossing than Ireland, but not 11 times more. (NZ has 1,390 to Ireland's 1,054.) Even adjusting for this, it's clear that the accident rate at NZ level crossings is many times higher than at Irish level crossings.

Cookie_Monster wrote: »

All of which is meaningless without train km to be honest. Lines in either locale could have 100 crossings and one train a day or 5 crossings and 50 trains a day so the number of crossings is not really relevant without usage. The busier line obviously carries the higher risk despite a much lower number of crossings.

Both are relevant, obviously. If the busy line has no level crossings, then there zero risk of level crossing accidents, so it’s not true to say that “the busier line obviously carries the higher risk despite a much lower number of crossings”. It depends on how much busier the line is, and how much lower the number of crossings is.

But I think the reality is that the NZ lines (a) are busier, and (b) have more level crossings, all of which means that even if construction standards were identical, we’d expect a higher rate of level crossing accidents in NZ. The fact that constructions standards aren’t identical only exacerbates that still more. I suggest all these factors are contributing to a NZ level crossing accident rate which is more than ten times higher than ours.

Cookie_Monster wrote: »

Clearly I'm not going to argue that NZ is safer based on the figures, just that the attitude is better and that despite the incidents they don't bother with pointless advertising to tell people what they should already be fully aware of.

If they “don’t bother with advertising”, and they have a much higher accident rate, how can you assert that the advertising would be “pointless”? Unless you think that the advertising would be pointless because New Zealanders are unteachable, the prospect of reducing the accident rate would seem to be a sufficient point. If, for the reasons we have discussed, NZ presents an unusually high risk of level crossing accidents, wouldn’t common sense suggest that an awareness of this risk, and public education on the safe use of level crossings, is more important, not less so?

It’s all very well to say that this is something New Zealanders “should already be fully aware of”, but the comparative accident figures do nothing to suggest that they are aware of it, and public policy really ought to be framed on the basis of how society is, not how it should be.