Tech companies ignore pleas on rail safety

Re:Tech companies ignore pleas on rail safety by Svip on Saturday August 10, 2019 @02:04PM (#20663584)

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.

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Re:Tech companies ignore pleas on rail safety by mhandley on Saturday August 10, 2019 @02:09PM (#20663617)

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?

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Re:Tech companies ignore pleas on rail safety by Svip on Saturday August 10, 2019 @02:11PM (#20663631)

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.

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Re:Tech companies ignore pleas on rail safety by aaronmgdr on Saturday August 10, 2019 @03:35PM (#20664072)

Most of the ones I have seen have gates

(I'm in the US)

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Re:Tech companies ignore pleas on rail safety by kd5bjo on Saturday August 10, 2019 @03:52PM (#20664154)

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.

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Re:Tech companies ignore pleas on rail safety by Freak_NL on Saturday August 10, 2019 @02:10PM (#20663623)

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?

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Re:Tech companies ignore pleas on rail safety by Svip on Saturday August 10, 2019 @02:15PM (#20663649)

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.

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