The Texas Transportation Institute has created a Grade Crossing “Impedance” or delay model that takes into account the volume and frequency of vehicular and train traffic at highway-rail grade crossings to estimate the amount of time motorists are delayed by rail traffic.
Anticipated Public Costs
The model measures the anticipated public costs associated with traffic delays and calculates the extra emissions and fuel usage experienced while delayed by a train at rail crossings.
The cost of collisions is added to time costs, emissions, and fuel use to provide an annualized estimate of total public costs at each grade crossing in the study.
Forecasting for growth in both rail and vehicular traffic provides an annualized estimate of public costs through the year 2016.
Public Benefit
The Net Present Value shown as the public benefit is the cumulative projected cost burden over a 10 year period.
This can be assessed as the savings associated with a grade separation or, as traffic levels change with changes to roadways and rail, the net savings to the public of each improvement being evaluated.
No public benefits of individual rail improvements were identified.
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