Joshua Freeman
Emerson Hoffman
Suzanna Hall
Tristan Verkade
Sean Thompson
Janae Hoffman
Nathan Haynes

We are involved in a project to improve safety at railroad crossings.

 

One of the problems we discovered while researching the project was that automobile drivers often misjudge the speed of an oncoming train.  It looks like it's going more slowly than it actually is, because it is so large.

 

Our idea is to put an electronic countdown timer similar to the ones used in some pedestrian crossings to tell the driver exactly how many seconds until the train crosses the tracks.  The lights would still flash and the arm would come down (if there is one), but now drivers that think that they could beat the train would see that they couldn't.