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Ed, I understand your points and agree with most of them. However, I am not advocating that crossings in general need more protection equipment, and I have no ideas of what type of improvements could be made to make crossings safer. The only exception to my position on this was for the Nevada crossing with the 70 mph speed limit.  I believe that crossing lacks advance warning because of the relatively high speed limit.  And I am not referring to the 25 second activation warning, which confuses the issue of approach warning.    For that Nevada crossing, I do advocate adding the advanced warning system that has been designed and approved for such applications by the FRA.  And I have suggested it here.  But when I suggested that several times in the Nevada thread, it was met with fierce resistance.  Yet the engineer of the Amtrak train that was hit by the truck at that crossing advocates the same advance warning or similar improvements.  Why there should be fierce resistance to the idea is an interesting study in itself.  Other than that crossing, I have taken not advocated any crossing improvements that I can recall.  I see a greater potential for improvement coming from looking at driver attitudes and perception, and possibly refocusing education on that.    In a very general sense, I perceive that grade crossings seem to have an unusual magnetism for attracting crashes.  So I ask why that is the case.  And I feel that if this is verified and understood, it could open the door to better crossing protection solutions or even better public compliance.  That is where I see the greatest potential for reducing the problem. I do not hold the view that all drivers who have been hit at grade crossings, or just violated them, were simply incorrigible and would stop at nothing.  I think that is the wrong explanation for their crossing behavior in many cases. Earlier I did mention that flashing red crossing signals lack any advance warning such as would be provided by flashing yellow preceding flashing red.  But I don’t know if that would help, and I am not advocating it.  My larger point is that the law about the crossing is technically defective because it requires a driver to stop instantaneously if the red lights activate in the driver’s face on approach.  It may not pose an immediate risk, but it does require the driver to break the law.  And when we are carefully allotting and counting seconds in the various phases of the activation warning cycle, I think it is amazing that we have this timing ambiguity built into the front of the cycle by a law that requires the impossible. I understand your point that some drivers will defeat every type of safety device.  But I do not believe that all drivers who defeat some of them would stop at nothing no matter what else was done to thwart them.  So all I am doing is looking mainly at the law, the warnings, and what goes on inside the heads of drivers.  It is the same thing that the MUTCD and the FRA are doing as they constantly search for new ways to improve the warning systems and reduce the problem.    As far as seeing accidents first hand, I agree that people would all be more careful if they saw more of them.  Maybe after seeing many, however, they would become hardened to them and resume taking chances.   But I can say that for me, seeing an accident first hand has an emotional effect that comes right out of left field.  It almost incapacitates my willingness to drive.  That emotional impact does heal though in a day or so.  I think that healed state is the normal condition for most drivers that have not just witnessed an accident.  And in that state, people take risks without being stopped by the potential consequences.  They rule out those consequences as part of their calculation deciding to take the risk.  But yes, the worst accidents possible in the abstract or seen in movies are not even in the same ballpark as one that is witnessed for real.  They are as different as bird feathers and avalanches.
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