Surely we can make railway crossings safer

A 53-year-old mother of five children lost her life at a railway crossing not far from her home on Forest Road last week. Jagjit Dhindsa died when her minivan was struck by an eastbound VIA Rail passenger train at the crossing. Police report the lights and signals at the crossing were activated before the accident occurred. Obviously, however, with tragic consequences, the flashing lights and signals were not enough to prevent the victim from crossing the tracks at the worst possible time.

There is no easy answer to the problem of how trains and other vehicles can avoid each other at all the intersections of all the rails and roadways across our country. Can every single crossing be equipped not only with lights but with wooden arms that lower and present a clear visual to drivers that danger approaches? Apparently not. The pricetag for installing the thousands upon thousands of arms that would be needed would be astronomical. So, we opt instead for arming only the busiest crossings and let the rest go, the majority with not even lights. This is done in the full knowledge that because of this, lives will be lost. In effect, it amounts to putting a price on human life and it has been decided that it is just too costly to save these lives that will surely be lost.

This is anything but a new dilemma. Drivers of horses and buggies and their passengers sometimes were hit and killed by trains 150 years ago. In a day when there was no possibility of flashing lights and arms that lowered to create a barrier, it might be understandable that people would die. What is our excuse today? In an age when we can unlock an apartment door in Stratford from a cellphone in Toronto or have someone in California or India open our GM truck by satellite on a back road in Perth County, surely there are higher-tech ways to protect us at railway crossings than lights and wooden arms. Despite their improvements, trains are still a 19th-century mode of transportation. Maybe we need 21st-century science to safeguard our crossings. And it’s definitely time we gave up the notion that a few lives lost is less of a concern than the high cost of saving them.