ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

I can't help but wonder if there is some better barrier for pedestrians than the standard crossing arm. The standard crossing arm/bells make sense for warning drivers, but don't really seem well-suited to pedestrians and cyclists.

• the loud warning bells are tuned to warn drivers in cars and are likely louder than needed for pedestrians and cyclists. This isn't a safety issue, but it does provide a disincentive for pedestrian crossings as they are disruptive to neighbours
  
• there is some possibility of injury from the barrier itself, though people would have to disregard the warning bells above. I think the risk is minimal, but I can think of several other designs that would present less of a hazard.
  
• the barrier is trivial to bypass. It is a barrier designed for cars, not people. A barrier should not be trivial to get around. That said, you don't want to confine someone on the guideway, so there has to be some way for them to leave it, but once again, I can think of several options for dealing with this.
  

These are some great points, and it's probably worth looking at other jurisdictions, what they do. As far as I've seen though, the only difference in other countries is the use of less ridiculously oversized equipment for pedestrian crossings.

As for the "barrier blocks cars" point, well, not that much, on a two way roads, cars can trivially and do navigate around the barrier in the other lane. This leads to many collisions. Which is why in certain other countries, where things are arguably more modern, the gates block both directions of the road.

I wonder if the nature of regulations in the railroad industry might stifle safety innovations. If regulations precisely outline what a barrier must be, there is no way for a company to innovate outside that box. Do people more knowledge about railways have any examples of how safety measures have evolved and improved over the last 50 years or so?

Yeah, I think it might be understating it to say that regulations stifle safety innovations.

The best example is the very rail cars themselves. Our crash standards are very different from European standards, as I understand it, ours require no deformation to avoid telescoping of cars in a crash with a freight train. Not only does this make little sense on passenger railways (and this type of collision is far less common on modern railways anyway), it leads to heavier, less efficient, more expensive, and more dangerous cars, compared with modern trains in Europe, which again, in my amateur understanding use something more similar to a crumple zone in a car in order to dissipate energy in a crash.

Edit: To bring this back into the realm of ION, I believe this is one of the region for the strong segregation between freight trains and LRT on our route, because the LRT vehicles would not normally be rated to operate mixed with freight traffic.