Comparing Relative Safety of Railway Transport Level Crossings by Data Envelopment Analysis

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been widely used for analyzing the safety of different modes of transportation. Its recent applications for level crossings have been successful to compare countries according to the safety of their level crossings or comparing relative safety of level crossings. This paper provides the most comprehensive DEA model which can assess the relative safety of level crossings by considering daily train traffic, daily vehicle traffic, number of railway tracks, number of road lanes, maximum speed of trains and road vehicles, the number of accidents, injuries and fatalities in the past. The model is used for the case study of all level crossings in Canada and is followed up by two Tobit regression models to investigate the impact of region and protection type. The proposed method can help railway policymakers and practitioners worldwide in ranking the safety of level crossings, prioritizing improvements, comparing different regions and achieving an overall decrease of accidents and fatalities at critical points.