Human Factors Toolkit for Level Crossing Design Interventions

Understanding human behaviour at Rail Level Crossings (RLX) is a problem that lends itself to a distributed cognition approach, whereby information processing, thus behaviour, is a product of the interaction between knowledge in a person’s mind and information within the external environment. The Rail Level Crossing Schema Action World Research Method (RLX-SWARM) project will develop and evaluate a Human Factors checklist for the design and evaluation of RLX sites, underpinned by a distributed cognition perspective, specifically the Perceptual Cycle framework. The overall aim is to enable RLX engineers and designers to consider the range of behavioural options for different RLX users, at RLX sites with different characteristics. This will be achieved by a data-driven development processes from an experienced project team in partnership with colleagues from National Rail.