Soon, Your Phone's Navigational Systems Could Warn You When Nearing Railroad Tracks

by Monica Joshi

More and more drivers use GPS and other map applications on their smartphones today to guide them to their destinations. While mobile device maps and applications are trusted sources for guidance, many of them do not notify drivers when they are approaching a railroad crossing; or worse, they do not identify that there is a railroad crossing at all.

Last year, in the U.S. alone, 270 people died in collisions between cars and trains. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has recently announced a measure that it hopes will lower that number of fatalities in the future.

When drivers are made aware, according to the FRA, they are more likely to remain alert, use greater caution, and even obey signal crossings. The FRA, however, needs Google's help to make this happen.

Many people use Google Maps, in particular, to get around. Because they rely on Google Maps to get safely from point A to point B, they expect the app to show them construction, traffic status, and even schedules for public transit routes. The app is only lacking in one thing: clearly labelled points where a road meets a railway crossing.

While the FRA already had an app that showed people the locations of every single one of the 250,000 railroad crossings in the country, it wasn't connected to navigational apps or devices. However, not many people used the app. Hence, the FRA is reaching out to Google and other companies that take that data and put it into their maps. It wants to make it so that once a driver approaches a crossing, their directions will alert them to their proximity to the train tracks.

Google has agreed. FRA's GIS data will be added to the smartphone mapping application and that just makes sense. The hope is that this additional notification will keep drivers more aware at the railroad crossings. Specifically, at the crossings that are not well-marked.

Sarah Feinberg, acting administrator of the FRA, wrote in a blog post that:

"For drivers and passengers who are driving an unfamiliar route, traveling at night, or who lose situational awareness at any given moment, receiving an additional alert about an upcoming crossing could save lives."

It would also be interesting to see the alerts and the ways in which the app plans on alerting the driver of the railroad crossing. It could, possibly, work best as a GPS system.

Photo Credit: Jorg Hackemann/Shutterstock