NEW YORK: The voice on Google Maps that tells you when to turn left or right is eventually going to warn of railroad grade crossings, too. Google has agreed to integrate the Federal Railroad Administration’s rail-crossing database, pinpointing roughly 250,000 public and private locations nationwide, into its mapping services. It is part of a recently announced initiative between the railroad agency and Google to try to cut down on the number of highway-rail collisions, which last year claimed 267 lives nationwide.
It was the first time this decade that the number of fatalities from such incidents increased from the previous year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
“The vast majority of these accidents and deaths are preventable,” wrote Sarah Feinberg, a former Facebook executive and now acting administrator of the FRA, in a June 29 letter of thanks to Google for taking on the project. “They are frequently the result of a driver’s lack of awareness of a crossing or an oncoming train, or a driver’s attempt to ‘beat the train.’?”
With audio and visual alerts of rail crossings added to Google Map’s turn-by-turn navigation feature, drivers “may be more likely to remain alert, take greater caution, and obey the signal crossings,” Feinberg said in her letter.
The initiative is still in the developmental stage, and there is no estimated start dates for the planned Google Maps feature, said Michael Cole, a spokesman for the rail agency.
Mobile applications that display the government’s rail-crossing data have already been developed for Apple and Android smartphones. However, they do not include audio and visual alerts to warn of nearby rail crossings and are generally designed more for workers in the field who may need quick access to rail-crossing specifications, Cole said.
Virginia was kind of lucky last year. There wasn’t a single road-rail-crossing fatality, though there were 42 grade-crossing collisions, up from 33 the year before. Thirteen people were injured, up from nine in 2013.
There are a total of 309 rail crossings – public and private, including pedestrian crossings – in the five South Hampton Roads cities, according to the rail agency’s data.
