Prioritization of Infrastructure Investment for Rail Safety Projects: A Corridor-Level Approach

This paper summarizes the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) Rail Division’s efforts in developing a methodology for prioritizing safety improvement projects for highway-rail at- grade crossings at the corridor-level. The goal is to optimize the use of limited funding to improve rail system reliability. By leveraging previous research which identifies and prioritizes individual projects using procedures such as benefit cost analysis, this approach aims to improve project selection by focusing on freight corridors rather than individual crossings. The proposed approach defines a metric that relates system reliability to crossing safety. It then uses binary programming to select an optimal set of safety improvement actions which maximize the improvement in system reliability. The defined framework can be expanded beyond crossing safety to include a more diverse set of projects and help decision makers with selecting projects that maximize overall system improvement.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB60 Standing Committee on Highway/Rail Grade Crossings.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Arellano, Johnny R
  • Mindick-Walling, Amy
  • Thomas, Andrew
  • Rezvani, Ali Z
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 12p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: At grade intersections; Benefit cost analysis; Infrastructure; Investments; Methodology; Optimization; Programming (Planning); Quantitative metrics; Railroad safety; Transportation corridors
• Identifier Terms: North Carolina Department of Transportation
• Uncontrolled Terms: Project selection
• Geographic Terms: North Carolina
• Subject Areas: Finance; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Railroads; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01630546
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-04963
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 28 2017 11:38AM