An investigation of railroad-highway grade crossing consolidation rating in Iowa

Railroad-highway grade crossings present unique safety and operational challenges on both the rail and highway side. Consolidation of these crossings can be a valuable tool to improve safety, but is often a source of disagreement among interested parties. In order to better evaluate crossings to determine their suitability to be consolidated, a spreadsheet-based tool was developed to rank all public, at-grade crossings in Iowa using a number of factors related to potential consolidation impacts. The spreadsheet will act as a tool to provide an objective rating of each crossing for use in analysis and negotiation for crossing consolidation. This thesis will outline the development of the spreadsheet-based tool and conduct a sensitivity analysis on the final crossing rankings to determine the robustness of the formula and which factors have a higher sensitivity to weight changes.