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 <o:p></o:p> Well, there certainly is a template among railroaders and railfans that every grade crossing victim is a moron, idiot, stupid, and deserves the Darwin Award.  Such deaths are celebrated as a victory in the war of weeding out the stupid and thereby improving society.  The reason for the crash can never be that the driver simply made a mistake.  Instead, the death is celebrated as fitting punishment, and the only regret is that the victim is dead and cannot be punished further.  This template arises from the frustration over the fact that trains always have the right of way, but nevertheless railroads are forced to deal with trespassers and crossing violators on a routine basis.   <o:p></o:p> However, blaming every pedestrian or driver death on the stupidity of the victim leaves no room to look for solutions to the problem.  I doubt that we will arrive at the day where all the stupid people have been killed off by the trains, and crossing deaths will therefore come to a permanent end as the Darwin Award hopes.  <o:p></o:p> I tend to push back against this Darwin template.  I have been interested in the causes of grade crossing crashes since being close to the railroad industry and observing how frequently trains hit cars and pedestrians.  There are deep issues at work in this dynamic, and you won’t spot them if you close your mind and blame them all on stupidity of the victim.   <o:p></o:p> When railroading first began, grade crossings were simply identified as railroad crossings.  A driver might cross and respond to the sign by saying, “yes, obviously.”  So in order to clarify why a railroad crossing needed to be identified with a sign, the message, “Look Out For The Cars” was added.  A driver needed to understand that he or she was being warned about the danger of a train, and not just being informed of the existence of a crossing.   <o:p></o:p> There is deep psychology at work with the grade crossing, and there are a wide variety of motives and unfamiliar contingencies that shape driver behavior.  I am convinced that if you could analyze the statistics of the number of vehicle-to-vehicle encounters and compare them to a like number of vehicle-to-train encounters, there would he a higher number of crashes in the vehicle-to-train encounters.  I can’t prove that because the data gathering would be an enormous project.  I doubt it has ever been done.  But I am convinced it would bear out my assumption.  <o:p></o:p> And while the industry and the fans all seem to know the answer, the traffic control authorities are a lot less certain.  They look at driver psychology, and they split hairs over it.  In the book, Metropolitan Corridor, author John R. Stilgoe includes a chapter titled, CROSSING.  That is by far the deepest exploration of the problem that I have ever seen.   <o:p></o:p> The author starts at the beginning.  He explains that in the 1900 era, railroads and their schedule keeping were held in such high esteem, that people set their clocks by the passage of the trains.  And they looked for trains at crossings when trains were due.  They looked less when no trains were due.  So trains running late tended to kill more people than trains on time.
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