Analysis of railway accidents at level crossings in Dhaka city

Abstract

Traffic safety has become a momentous issue at level crossings in Dhaka city. Level crossing accidents has become a common phenomenon in Dhaka city. There are 42 nos. railway level crossings and 6 nos. railway stations in Dhaka city between Jurine and Abdullahpur of which 29 level crossings are authorized and 13 nos. are unauthorized 20 of these are associated with major roads and remaining 22 are associated with minor roads. The operational management and control is one of the important factors of safety at level crossings. Most of the people involved in level crossing operation are not well trained. The geometric parameters at crossings such as visibility, radii of curvatures of approach roads, illegal parking at approach road of crossings, lower length of straight portion of road, width of gates, distance between gate lodge and road centerline etc are found to be substandard, which are also the key issues for safety problems at level crossings and are taken into account in this study. The road surface condition is also considered as a safety factor. Information is collected from different sources for analysis and identifying the causes of safety problems at level crossings in Dhaka city. The field data collection is also carried out at selected accident-prone level crossings. The level crossing accidents is 14% of all rail related accidents in Dhaka division and the same in Dhaka city is 53%. So the rate of level crossing accidents in Dhaka city is very high. The analysis of data related to safety at level crossings is carried out extensively. The vulnerable crossing types, the geometric problems, the warning measures are assessed. Advanced controlling system has been studied to suggest for improvement of safety status. In this study, the Traffic Moments (TM) of the accident-prone level crossings are studied. The TM Values for Khilgaon, Mogbazar and Staff road level crossings are calculated 5977557, 3841182, and 10531296 respectively. These TM values are much higher than the top end TM values for warrant of grade separation intersection considered in Iran, Thailand, and India which are 288000, 1000000, and 100,000 respectively. Therefore, these selected level crossings are suggested for grade separation.