Estimating countermeasure effects for reducing collisions at highway-railway grade crossings

Frequently transportation engineers are required to make difficult safety investment decisions in the face of uncertainty concerning the cost-effectiveness of different countermeasures. For certain types of highway-railway grade crossings, this problem is further aggravated due to the lack of observed before and after collision data that reflects the impact of specific countermeasures. This study proposes a Bayesian data fusion method as an attempt to overcome these challenges. In this framework, we make use of previous research findings on the effectiveness of a given countermeasure, which could vary by jurisdictions and operating conditions to obtain a priori inference on its expected effects. We then use locally calibrated models, which are valid for a specific jurisdiction, to develop the current best estimates regarding the countermeasure effects. By using a Bayesian framework, these two sources are integrated to obtain the posterior distribution of the countermeasure effectiveness. As a result, the outputs provide information not only of the expected collision response to a specific countermeasure but also its variance and corresponding probability distribution for a range of likely values. Examples from Canadian highway-railway grade crossing data are used to illustrate the proposed methodology and the specific effects of prior knowledge and data likelihood on the combined estimates of countermeasure effects.