Development and Implementation of a Trespass Location Severity Analysis on a Commuter Rail Right of Way

The United States Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) Research and Innovative Technology Administration’s John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (Volpe Center), under the direction of the USDOT Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Office of Research and Development (R&D), is conducting a Trespass Prevention Research Study (TPRS) in the city of West Palm Beach, Florida. The main objective of this research is to demonstrate potential benefits, including documenting best practices and lessons learned, of implementation and evaluation of trespass prevention strategies on the rail network in West Palm Beach, Florida and all of its rights-of-way. This paper will detail the development and implementation of a risk based data analysis to determine the locations of highest trespass risk along the TriRail commuter rail corridor through the City of West Palm Beach, FL. This feeds into the overall study objective by providing a methodology for prioritizing safety improvement programs for high-risk trespass locations. The research team used a hazard analysis process based on the U.S. Department of Defense’s MIL-STD-882 and the APTA hazard identification/resolution processes. The adaptation of this methodology facilitated the systematic identification, analysis, and resolution/mitigation of hazards for this study. The research team also developed a risk-based prioritization algorithm for analyzing the trespass issue on the corridor. The hazard analysis and risk-based prioritization algorithm were used to identify several trespass high-risk areas along the TriRail corridor. The results of the analysis have been used by the study’s stakeholder group, composed of railroads, state and local agencies, and their safety partners, to develop a set of mitigation strategies for those higher-risk locations as identified though this analysis.