The maps app on your smartphone soon could be able to tell you about the location of an upcoming railroad crossing. Audio and visual alerts will soon be coming to many smartphones because of a new partnership between Google and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA).
Finding innovative ways to reduce the death rate at 225,000 railroad crossings in the US is a major priority of the new FRA administrator, Sarah Feinberg.
Railroad safety has improved overall in the US, but fatalities and railroad crossing accidents increased in 2014, which was the year before Feinberg took the helm. There were 267 deaths in 2014, up from 232 in 2013.
FRA has not determined what caused deaths to increase so dramatically that year. They think it could be that there were just more drivers on the roads and more trains on the tracks.
But some experts think that technology is not doing a good enough job to prevent railroad crossing deaths, and they hope that the new Google/FRA partnership will help.
FRA currently requires each state to do monthly inspections of 5000 railroad crossings that have the crossing interconnected with a traffic signal. When it is working right, the signals can usually prevent cars and trains from being on the tracks at the same time. But if the signals are not working right, bad things can happen.
As this new partnership gets under way, the FRA hopes that drivers getting alerts from their smartphone about an upcoming railroad crossing can save lives.
Our railroad accident lawyers in Virginia and North Carolina are pleased that the US government is working with Google to leverage technology to prevent needless railroad crossing deaths. Our railroad crossing accident lawyers have represented far too many families of the injured and killed in these mostly preventable tragedies, such as this railroad crossing accident in Prince William County VA that led to a sizable settlement.