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Railroad Trespassing is Risky Business

Some people do dangerous things at railroad crossings. Marco daSilva, a systems safety program manager at Volpe, described how recent work, in support of the Federal Railroad Administration, has captured images of a car whose driver had run the safety gates and stopped only inches from a passing...

Disaster Recovery: Stay Safe and Train Often

A casual sport shirt and khakis are Terry Sheehan's version of dressing for success. "You have to always be ready—you never know where you might end up," he said. Sheehan, the Regional Emergency Transportation Representative for the U.S. DOT's New England Region, is prepared to be deployed...

Cracked Up—Broken Rails Are Serious Business

Nearly all cracks in rails are hidden—so says Dr. David Jeong, senior mechanical engineer at Volpe, The National Transportation Systems Center. Jeong and his colleagues, in support of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), have been examining the mechanics of metal fatigue and crack growth...

Resilient Infrastructure Can Take a Licking and Keep On Ticking

"Overcoming adversity used to be part of the American DNA. Can we build that back into our national character?" It's more than a philosophical question for Stephen Flynn, co-founder of the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security and professor of political science at...

New Tools Investigated in Hazard Analysis Research for Vehicular Systems

There was a time when travel safety could be improved by training drivers and designing crash survival into vehicles. That is no longer the case, said Dr. Qi Van Eikema Hommes, senior electronics engineer in Volpe's Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies. "Your car is no longer a...

Big Data Analytics: Driving Value Beyond the Hype

We are currently experiencing an explosion of "big data." Big data is "a collection of digital data sets so large and complex that it is beyond the capabilities of current database management tools," said Robert C. Johns, associate administrator and director of Volpe, The National Transportation...