Utilizing video to understand pedestrian crossing compliance

Written by Mischa Wanek-Libman, Editor, Railway Track & Structures; and Engineering Editor, Railway Age
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The Communications & Signals breakout session of the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association's (AREMA) Annual Conference being held in conjunction with Railway Interchange 2015, presented nine papers discussing various approaches to C&S challenges.

Gerard Reminiskey of HDR Engineering, Inc., presented “Video Analysis of Railroad At-Grade Crossing Pedestrian Usage.”

Reminiskey explained that industry best-practices aim to reduce the risk of pedestrian-involved accidents at crossings by providing safety features that warn of potential train-pedestrian conflicts, but says the evaluation of pedestrian compliance with those safety features is difficult to evaluate.

“Design implementation requires a solid understanding of a crossing’s existing safety and operational characteristics. Video analysis provides an unobtrusive method to observe pedestrian usage patterns,” said Reminiskey.

He described two case studies in which video analysis techniques supported the evaluation of pedestrian usage of the crossings. Both locations are in southern California, but one is in an affluent suburban neighborhood, while the other was located in a city’s urban industrial core.

“Video analysis techniques allow efficient, cost-effective observation of railroad at-grade crossing pedestrian usage. The selected methodology – manual counts of video data – provided a level of insight on the two case studies that would have been difficult to achieve with automated or onsite collection techniques,” said Reminiskey.

Additional papers presented during the C&S breakout session included A Novel Approach to Obsolescence Engineering for Long Term Classification Yard Infrastructure; Benefits of Railroad Signal Software Simulation; Ballast Resistance Measurement – Theory and Practice; Deploying a Solution for Dynamically Predicting Hot Box Detector Failures; System Level Full Scale Lightning Testing of PTC Wayside C&S Systems; The Trouble with Towers; E-ATC as a PTC System and Challenges of PTC Interoperability.

The full presentations can be viewed in the AREMA 2015 Conference Proceedings.

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