There are red flashing light controls outside numerous Fire and Ambulance stations, and these don't have barriers; do these cause confusion to drivers?
In my area they are used so rarely people don’t expect them, and some of them are half-hidden by vegetation, so generally they do cause confusion if they get illuminated, and tend to be ignored even more than level crossings!
In one case, the red “wig-wags” are designed so stupidly that they also face towards fire appliances emerging from the fire station, so if nobody drove past, the local town would probaby have caught fire at least once by now...
Those fire stations on genuinely tricky road layouts (where blue lights on the vehicles themselves would not suffice) tend to be situated on a custom-built junction where the sequence / priority on regular-looking traffic lights is simply set to favour emergency vehicles.
It’s interesting to note that even where trams operate at reasonably brisk speeds, albeit on (vaguely) line-of-sight driving, road traffic is typically controlled by normal traffic lights, and pedestrians get normal crossing lights or no indications at all. Trams don’t seem to have any more collisions than other large vehicles such as HGVs and the lights are generally seen as entirely normal, just with a different type of vehicle crossing.
(As an aside, in central Croydon at the moment, there appears to have been an update to the traffic lights which has inadvertently meant that once a tram clears a junction, the road traffic lights go straight from red to green, skipping the red+amber phase, which is proving rather popular with motorists.)
if you were approaching a crossing, with booms up but lights flashing, you'd go on and not stop ? If you were at the crossing, and only one went up, you would obviously know there was a problem