• Our booking engine at tickets.railforums.co.uk (powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!

Trivia: Busiest level crossings by both road and rail usage combined

Status
Not open for further replies.

Bald Rick

Veteran Member
Joined
28 Sep 2010
Messages
29,172
Multiplying the two numbers together doesn’t make any sense. Adding them up is the only thing that makes sense.

Agreed, in which case Foxton has it.

It should have been bridged a long time ago; Cambridgeshire county highways have had proposals on the blocks since 1955. And some people say the railway are slow...
 
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R

RailUK Forums

JamesRowden

Established Member
Joined
31 Aug 2011
Messages
1,715
Location
Ilfracombe
Multiplying the two numbers together doesn’t make any sense. Adding them up is the only thing that makes sense.
Summing the total length of vehicles/trains would make the most sense. Or the proportion of time that the crossing is occupied by a vehicle/train.
 
Last edited:

Belperpete

Established Member
Joined
17 Aug 2018
Messages
1,645
Multiplying the two numbers together doesn’t make any sense. Adding them up is the only thing that makes sense.
How busy a crossing is, is determined by the traffic moment. If you have ten road vehicles a day, and one train, there are ten chances of a vehicle being stopped by a train. If you have ten road vehicles a day, and two trains, there are twenty chances of a vehicle being stopped by a train. The crossing is twice as busy.

Agreed, in which case Foxton has it.
Actually, by that measure (vehicles + trains), Boston West St has it by a very wide margin. Foxton only comes #11.
 
Last edited:

Bald Rick

Veteran Member
Joined
28 Sep 2010
Messages
29,172
How busy a crossing is, is determined by the traffic moment. If you have ten road vehicles a day, and one train, there are ten chances of a vehicle being stopped by a train. If you have ten road vehicles a day, and two trains, there are twenty chances of a vehicle being stopped by a train. The crossing is twice as busy.

Actually, by that measure (vehicles + trains), Boston West St has it by a very wide margin. Foxton only comes #11.


Your first part is wrong. If there are ten road vehicles a day and one train, there are ten chances of being stopped by a train.

If there are ten road vehicles and two trains, there are still ten chances of being stopped by a train, as there are only ten road vehicles. Each chance has a higher probability of course (albeit not double the probability, as we don’t know the times of each train, or each road vehicle).

I hadn’t seen all the road data, so I sure you are right about the second part.
 

Belperpete

Established Member
Joined
17 Aug 2018
Messages
1,645
Your first part is wrong. If there are ten road vehicles a day and one train, there are ten chances of being stopped by a train.
If there are ten road vehicles and two trains, there are still ten chances of being stopped by a train, as there are only ten road vehicles. Each chance has a higher probability of course (albeit not double the probability, as we don’t know the times of each train, or each road vehicle).
If the road and rail vehicles are randomly spaced, then the probability of a random train/car intersection doubles.

In practice, there will usually be a time of day (and even time of year) when a crossing is busiest. Also, the road traffic moment actually starts to go down, once road traffic reaches a certain level, as the probability increases that you will be stopped not by the train, but by the car in front (that is stopped by the train), or the car in front of that.......... These are all taken into account when the crossing type and risk is evaluated. Unfortunately, the data given on the spreadsheet doesn't allow us to deduce such niceties, and we can only calculate the basic V*T.
 

Bald Rick

Veteran Member
Joined
28 Sep 2010
Messages
29,172
If the road and rail vehicles are randomly spaced, then the probability of a random train/car intersection doubles.

That’s broadly correct yes, for crossings with relatively low use.

But you still can’t have more possible interactions than the number of road vehicles crossing.
 

Western Sunset

Established Member
Joined
23 Dec 2014
Messages
2,508
Location
Wimborne, Dorset
The footbridge at Poole is indeed still in use; it's the original one from when the line opened in 1874. However, the steps are steep and it's quite narrow, so most folk just wait at the barriers.
 

norbitonflyer

Established Member
Joined
24 Mar 2020
Messages
2,363
Location
SW London
Also, the road traffic moment actually starts to go down, once road traffic reaches a certain level, as the probability increases that you will be stopped not by the train, but by the car in front (that is stopped by the train), or the car in front of that..........

Not so - if you are stopped behind another car because that is waiting for the gates, then the train is still the ultimate cause of you stopping. The stats also don't take into account that at somewhere like North Sheen you may have to wait for several trains before you get through, as the gates are not raised for long enough between trains to clear the traffic queue. And the stats do not take i8nto account the extra traffic that is diverted to other roads, such as the South Circular* and the Richmond one way system - neither of which are capable of taking any more traffic - to avoid the queues.

*unlike its northern partner, the SCR is merely a collection of signposts connecting together suburban high streets.
 

Midnight Sun

Member
Joined
16 Sep 2018
Messages
310
Though, from memory when I last went there (I was 11, which is some time ago!) there is a pedestrian footbridge at the LC, so not quite as inconvenient as for a vehicle. Whether peds choose to use the footbridge of course...
Not many people use it, as it is both streep and narrow. The underpass under Towngate Bridge is below sea level so tends to flood in heavy rain.

Poole High Street Crossing.jpg Poole High Street Crossing Bridge.jpg Poole high street crossing CCTV.jpg
 

Belperpete

Established Member
Joined
17 Aug 2018
Messages
1,645
Not so - if you are stopped behind another car because that is waiting for the gates, then the train is still the ultimate cause of you stopping.
Agreed that the train is still the ultimate cause of you stopping, but the road traffic moment (which is used to calculate crossing risk) does go down as the traffic increases, because the chances of a car jumping the crossing decreases as the traffic increases, due to the increasing likelihood of you being stopped by a car in front, not just by the crossing. This was all explained in detail, together with graphs, in one of enquiry reports into level crossing accidents. The trouble is, I can't remember which one - I have got the Stott Report into my mind, but I think that was something totally different! I think it was the one that effectively put a stop to AOC(R)s.
 

Ken H

On Moderation
Joined
11 Nov 2018
Messages
6,288
Location
N Yorks
Multiplying the two numbers together doesn’t make any sense. Adding them up is the only thing that makes sense.
surely you need to calculate average road vehicle occupants, then average train occupants and add them together?
 

Lucan

Established Member
Joined
21 Feb 2018
Messages
1,211
Location
Wales
Notably all but one are on the Southern, but interestingly some are well outside the inner London area.
In inner South London there seems to have been much trouble taken to avoid level crossings, sometimes with roads dipping under the railway. However places like Barnes and Merton were country areas when those lines were built and level crossings were not seen as a problem at the time.
Multiplying the two numbers together doesn’t make any sense. Adding them up is the only thing that makes sense.
No, it makes more sense to multiply them because that relates to conflicts. Think of an occupation crossing on a busy main line which a farmer uses just twice a day. Or OTOH an industrial branch line LC with a freight movement twice a week on busy main road . Neither of those cases is as much of a problem as a moderately used railway line (say 4 tph) crossing a moderarately used road. Moreover, as road traffic movements are orders of magnitude above rail movements, the result of simply adding the numbers would be dominateded by the road traffic, and the volume of rail traffic would have hardly any effect on the assessment.
 
Last edited:

etr221

Member
Joined
10 Mar 2018
Messages
1,051
My thought - not that I can be bothered to come up with figures - is that the train figure should be adjusted to account for the much greater crossing occupancy of a train (15 sec actual crossing + 45 sec closing???) vs a vehicle (5 sec?), then add them.

And if you're going to consider Tramlink (and other such), which are level crossings, and which cross roads? (I suspect the latter may have higher figures)
 

alistairlees

Established Member
Joined
29 Dec 2016
Messages
3,737
In inner South London there seems to have been much trouble taken to avoid level crossings, sometimes with roads dipping under the railway. However places like Barnes and Merton were country areas when those lines were built and level crossings were not seen as no problem at the time.

No, it makes more sense to multiply them because that relates to conflicts. Think of an occupation crossing on a busy main line which a farmer uses just twice a day. Or OTOH an industrial branch line LC with a freight movement twice a week on busy main road . Neither of those cases is as much of a problem as a moderately used railway line (say 4 tph) crossing a moderarately used road. Moreover, as road traffic movements are orders of magnitude above rail movements, the result of simply adding the numbers would be dominateded by the road traffic, and the volume of rail traffic would have hardly any effect on the assessment.
I was responding to the OP’s point which was about the total number of movements across a level crossing, and not the risk rating.

Multiplying the two figures together to assess risk rating is very crude and does not take lots of pertinent things like crossing occupation time, time of day, traffic patterns, average occupancy, types of user etc. into account.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Top