More than 80 experts from 18 countries have shared experiences about the human factor and the new technologies applied in railway level crossings at the SAFER-LC Conference last week in Madrid, Spain.

The day was inaugurated by the managing director of the Foundation, who underlined the importance of integrating the vision of roads and railways to improve safety at the level crossings, and by the head of the Safety Division of the International Union of Railways (UIC), which emphasized the interest of projects funded by Europe that bring together experts from the road and rail sector to share experiences.

The day focused on various presentations around the main achievements around Human Factors. Innovative technical solutions to make level crossings more intelligent were also presented including technologies to detect dangerous situations, automatic detection of incidents in real time; existing intelligent wireless detection techniques, as well as photogrammetric devices for remote monitoring and maintenance and many others.

 

The afternoon was reserved for different national and international projects. Erwin Vermassen, SAFE STRIP project coordinator and senior manager at ERTICO – ITS Europe presented the SAFE STRIP H2020 project on safe and ecological sensor technologies for interactive road applications. SAFE STRIP will introduce a technology embedding C-ITS applications into existing road infrastructure through low-cost, integrated strips on the road. These strips will provide personalised in-vehicle messages such as hazard warnings to all road users (equipped and non-equipped vehicles).

SAFER-LC, SAFE STRIP and SAFE-10-T are working together to, among other, improve safety at the level crossings.  SAFER-LC researches how train level crossings can be made safer, and how they will, among other tasks inform road drivers on approaching trains. This information can be used as an additional input to the SAFE STRIP Use Case related to the unprotected railway crossings. In specific, the smart detection system of SAFER-LC will provide feedback to the Road Side Bridge of the SAFE STRIP system.

Click here to see all the SAFER-LC mid-term conference presentations.