Compared with the UK where I previously lived, the US has a large number of railway crossings in urban and suburban areas, full stop. So many of these would be a bridge or cutting in the UK. I used to live in a city where the train literally ran down the middle of the road. Secondly the marking is somewhat understated and can look confusingly similar to a regular intersection, many do not have barriers, and many are adjacent to or run through a road intersection with conventional lights, for added confusion. Finally, the US allows right-turn on red, so it’s normal to pass through a red light and make a turn.

In many places in the US, there are only flashing lights to indicate a train. Where I grew up in the rural midwest, this was very common on county roads routinely with speed limits over 50mph. Even if aggressively starting the flashing lights early, there are just extremely common situations where you’re going 50mph just to keep safe with the flow of traffic and the light flashes at the wrong time and you can’t stop. It could easily result in accidents even for people who are very cautious of train crossings.

In a lot of cases, the lack of an actual automated barrier is just down to budget & maintenance costs. The sparse communities can’t afford to pay to install them or maintain them, and there are too many train crossings that are too spread out rurally for the state to maintain them. If one of them malfunctioned there could be lawsuits, or it could block road traffic on critical county roads where the nearest possible alternate route might be tens of miles away, and the road is needed for school buses, emergencg vehicles, snow removal, etc.

So in total these communities just accept the risk because it’s logistically intractable otherwise.

Some of it is people driving down the railway track. It may be confusing at night (all the incidents I could find mentioned in the bottom happened at night), particularly if there is a road junction immediately following the railway crossing, that you were supposed to turn on. Then an indicator to 'cross the railway, and then turn right' would be nice.

Although, I wonder whether US railway crossings can be hard to see at night.

Old-style railway crossings often included gates that closed across the tracks to prevent this happening. http://i.ytimg.com/vi/3VF4hWvjC3g/maxresdefault.jpg

Is it really that hard for the railways to fix this problem with better modern automated gates?

I've only seen those kinds of gates in Europe. Mind, I have not seen all US railway crossings, but I have seen a few, and none of them had gates like that. Plus, I think there is too little money in the railway network's budget to implement those gates, so asking navigation apps to do it for them is the cheap option.

Most of the ones I have seen have gates

(I'm in the US)

US rail crossing gates tend to move vertically, and there’s never a barrier that crosses the tracks, only the road. Sometimes, they only block the road in the direction of travel which leaves an easy path for drivers to go around the gates if they’re feeling impatient.

What makes this primarily a US thing though? One would imagine that even if you manage to turn onto a railroad track accidentally, wouldn't driving on it immediately tell you that you left the comparatively smooth road surface?

I am only speculating, but I think in Europe at least, there is a tendency to avoid railway crossings with rails that run parallel to another road. And if that cannot be avoided, the trains are required to run very slowly along those tracks. Part of the problem here is that the trains are unable to stop in time, because these are high speed tracks.

They are usually well marked, but only higher traffic ones have barriers.

Many don't have lights.