Grade XA Network Screening and Countermeasure Analysis Tool for Highway-Railway Grade Crossings

A highway-railway grade crossing safety improvement program is usually established through a set of steps that are often time-consuming, requiring application of complex statistical risk models and assessment of a large number of alternative solutions. This paper describe a web application called GradeX that has been developed to meet this need by providing an interface to automate these tasks and perform what-if analysis. It is a decision-support tool that can be used by railway safety engineers and decision-makers in Canada to identify and target grade crossing hotspots, evaluate countermeasures, and prioritize safety improvement projects. This paper provides an overview of this tool, including: a) its relation to various decision support needs arising in grade crossing safety work; b) its system framework and components; c) its methodologies for identifying hotspots and evaluating the effectiveness of