Today I'm going to share some half-formed thoughts about the relationship between the safety of train crossings vs the safety of pedestrians crossing roads.

According to the Transportation Safety Board of Canada there were around 1000 train accidents in 2020. Based on their charts 13% of those were at crossings, which means we had around 130 accidents at crossings.

Now according to ICBC's statistics for traffic vs pedestrian issues in BC in 2020 we had 1161 collisions involving pedestrians. These may not specifically be at designated crosswalks.

My biggest though so far is that we value business more than people. There are a number of level crossings but I'm going to focus on the three I've seen in current active use.

You'll note that crossing 1 and 2 have gates that swing down to block traffic from accessing the road when a train has triggered the arms.

Contrast that with the crossing where my kids walk to go to school. Until a month ago it was simply some painted lines on the road. Now it looks like the picture below, some painted lines and some blinking lights. The biggest improvement is the concrete island in the middle which means you can cross part of the road only and find an island of safety from the cars surrounding you.

Current crosswalk with blinking lights

Given that we had only 130 crossing incidents for trains vs 1161 for pedestrians...why aren't we doing more at pedestrian crossings? Why don't we have arms coming down to block traffic until someone has crossed the road safely?

It seems to me that we designed the system to protect commerce via trains and have deemed 1161 accidents involving pedestrians as not a big problem. We're willing to live with 1161 pedestrian issues because we wouldn't want to harm the poor car owners.

Ultimately, I'd like to dig deeper into this, along with many other topics around the idea that we really don't care about "the children" because we don't actually spend on them. Future topics will be:

  • We don't spend much on school funding

  • The waits for health care in Canada, and prices in the US, are such that we clearly don't value health care for children

  • The environmental choices we make is leaving kids with a big mess to clean up

  • Car design...maximizes issues for kids

  • We don't support parents, especially in the US with it's dismal parental leav

  • Basic income would improve the lives of children

If you've got resources you think would be useful...let me know.