At the end of last year, the public transport agency joined forces with RailSery – which uses cameras, light detection and variety, as well as automatic learning technology – to mitigate collisions to some of the passages. The first passage of the supervised system was Broadway, recently followed by a crossing of Churchill Avenue in Palo Alto.
Burlingame’s crossing tends to see a high level of vehicle collisions, because two traffic lights closely located on each side of the Broadway tracks are in many cases insufficiently timed, causing the construction of the congestion of the traffic between the lights, including on a part of the railway. But the passage of Palo Alto sees not only the collisions of vehicles, but it also has a higher rate of people who died on the tracks, mainly suicide. The two were factors in the decision to implement technology at the crossing.
So far, the results are promising, said security director Mike Meader. The initial data have shown that around three times a week, cars often turned on railroad tracks, especially at night, thinking that it was nearby parallel street. Since then, the transit agency has added several safety markers to the tracks, including markers with red lights and flexible plastic posts for delimitation.
“It helped us understand that by watching the video and obtaining the detection … that vehicles tried to turn off the road and on tracks at a much higher rate than expected,” said me. “They managed to get back on the road, but we would not have known it without this technology.”
Only two other rail agencies use RailS in the same way, both in Texas, he said. Technology uses automatic learning to learn what the behavior of vehicles, individuals and pedestrians should look like at a particular intersection. Once a change detected – generally by parameters developed by Caltrain – The RailSrentry surveillance center is alerted, which then informs the distribution of Caltrain.
David Canepa, a member of the Caltrain Board of Directors and Chairman of the San Mateo County Supervisors Council, said the improvements were cruelly necessary, especially since they are pregnant with the cost of grade separations.
“It could help us really have an impact on the safeguarding of lives and at the same time do it in a way that could be very profitable,” said Canepa. “We are in an environment where the transit is on the verge of failure, we must therefore ensure that when AI technologies come out, we kiss it.”
A Broadway grade separation has been discussed for years and recently, Caltrain has announced that original project plans should cost around $ 889 million, more than double the initial estimate of $ 316 million just a few years ago. The implementation costs of RailSery and the following security markers were just under $ 300,000 in the Broadway Crossing.
The agency is also faced with an important structural deficit. In July 2026, the average annual deficit will be at least $ 75 million, according to the January estimates.
The mayor of Burlingame, Peter Stevenson, said that he thought that technology was a short -term beneficial solution, although the impact remains to be determined.
“On the surface, it seems good, but I think it is too early to draw conclusions on the data,” said Stevenson. “When you contrast it to grade separation, which is a complete risk elimination … It is a provisional solution for the most part, we therefore want to continue to study what the data shows.”