New cars are safer than ever. Semi-autonomous features like adaptive cruise and lane-keeping assist and Volvo's new left turn crash detection are great at preventing crashes from ever happening.
But there's one place where all that technology, airbags, and seat belts aren't much help: train crossings. Even the world's safest car would lose—badly—to a freight train traveling 70 mph.
Those battles happen more often than you'd think. In the United States last year 270 people were killed at the 215,000 grade crossings, an increase of 38 deaths from 2013 (though it's possible some of those were suicides and not accidents). To try to cut down on accidents, the Federal Railroad Administration is sharing data on all the country's grade crossings with Google Maps.
Google hasn't yet decided exactly how to implement the data, but it could offer visual or audio alerts during navigation when a grade crossing is coming up. Whatever the details, the goal is to make railroad crossings more obvious to Maps users in an era of increasingly distracted driving.
"We're happy to help the Federal Railroad Administration as we're always looking for new ways to make maps useful to our users," a Google spokesperson says.
Railroads are already shown on Google Maps, but specifically calling out grade crossings could help keep people safer. The New York Times reports the FRA has reached out to other map makers, including Apple, about implementing the crossing data into other digital maps.
Apple did not return a request for comment. We'll let you make your own jokes about the quality of their mapping.
No word from Google about when the crossing data might make its way to Google Maps. Of course, there's an easy way for you to stay safe. As the super-catchy train safety campaign Dumb Ways To Die tells us, don't jump the gates at a level crossing. Because you might die. So don't do it, eh?
