{
  "id": "2000-may-railroad-safety",
  "slug": "2000-may-railroad-safety",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-may-railroad-safety.html",
  "year": 2000,
  "month": "May",
  "monthNum": 5,
  "headline": "Railroad safety",
  "kicker": "CAR ON DEADLINE",
  "author_name": "Trebor Banstetter",
  "author_title": "Reporter",
  "affiliation": "The Palm Beach Post",
  "summary": "Following a fatal train accident, a reporter used Federal Railroad Administration databases to reveal that Palm Beach County had the highest rate of railroad crossing crashes in Florida.",
  "keywords": [
    "railroad safety",
    "FRA",
    "public records"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Public Safety",
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Technology"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "Access",
    "Excel"
  ],
  "full_text": "A horrific crash at a West Palm Beach railroad crossing shocked residents in March 1999: A car sitting at the crossing gates was pushed into the path of a speeding Amtrak liner after being rear-ended by another car, killing a 19-year-old. The crash was the latest in a series of car-train smashups in South Florida. As a reporter covering transportation for The Palm Beach Post, the crashes made me wonder just how safe railroad crossings really are. I was fortunate to have some CAR training from NICAR and Cox computer journalism guru Elliot Jaspin. I had already spent some time poking around railroad safety databases, and saw the West Palm Beach crash as an opportunity to put railroad-crossing safety in a broader perspective. Fortunately for CAR reporters, the Federal Railroad Administration has an extensive national database of railroad crossing collisions online going back to 1975, at http://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/officeofsafety. The Web site has a searchable front-end, but it allows you to download the entire database, which is more useful for CAR work. This file has all reported cases of an impact between on-track equipment (usually a train) and anything on a public or private highway-railroad intersection, including a wealth of other information. Getting the data. First, I got the record layout in PDF format, which is very detailed and includes all codes used in the data. Then I went to the \"Download Database Files\" page. Several databases are available, but I wanted the \"Grade Crossing Accidents\" file. One downside is that you cannot download every year at once. I wanted to look at five year's worth of data, so I downloaded each year and merged them into a single Access table. The data downloads in a self-extracting file that becomes a fixed-length text file. The record layout shows where the fields start and stop so you can import it into a spreadsheet or database software. After importing the data into Microsoft Access, I ran several queries to gauge the situation in Palm Beach County. The findings. The findings were significant. In the past five years, the county had more crashes than any other in Florida — in fact, it was among the worst in the nation. The crashes here also had higher injury and fatality rates than elsewhere in the state. I used two more FRA databases available on the same site (Public and Private Crossings) to compare the number of crashes with the total number of railroad crossings in the county. Again, Palm Beach was at the top of the state's list of crashes per crossing. It took a flurry of traditional reporting to discover the reasons behind the county's poor safety rate. Problems included a combination of the area's high growth rate, increasing traffic congestion and heavy freight and passenger railroad traffic. I also sat alongside a train engineer for a ride from West Palm Beach to Miami to see the problems up close. I was astounded at the number of near misses the train encountered on a single trip. The weekend after that fatal West Palm Beach crash, The Post published the story. It took only a few days to turn around, but it put the incident into a broader context and gave our readers something to think about the next time they approach railroad crossings.",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "pre-v2",
    "extracted_at": "",
    "verified": true
  },
  "similar": [
    {
      "slug": "1996-april-riding-the-a-train",
      "score": 0.632
    },
    {
      "slug": "1996-june-tracking-rail-safety",
      "score": 0.579
    },
    {
      "slug": "2001-novemberdecember-tracking-rail-accidents",
      "score": 0.324
    },
    {
      "slug": "2004-november-data-helps-probe-death-on-the-tracks",
      "score": 0.238
    },
    {
      "slug": "1999-januaryfebruary-hidden-hazards-618",
      "score": 0.147
    }
  ],
  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-may-railroad-safety.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-may-railroad-safety.json"
}