The objective of this paper is to cast users of railway level crossings as flexible and adaptive decision-makers, and to apply a cognitive systems engineering approach to discover new behaviour-based insights for improving safety. Collisions between trains and road vehicles at railway level crossings/grade crossings remain a global issue. It is still far from apparent why drivers undertake some of the behaviours that lead to collisions, and there remains considerable justification for continuing to explore this issue with novel methods and approaches. In this study, 220 level crossing encounters by 22 car drivers were subject to analysis. Concurrent verbal protocols provided by drivers as they drove an instrumented vehicle around a pre-defined route were subject to content analysis and mapped onto Rasmussen’s Abstraction Decomposition Space. Three key results emerged. First, when they realise they are in a crossing environment, drivers’ natural tendencies are to look for trains (even if not required), slow down (again, even if not required), and for their behaviour to be shaped by a wide variety of constraints and affordances (some, but not all, put there for that purpose by railway authorities). The second result is that expert decision-making in these situations does not describe a trajectory from high-level system purposes to low-level physical objects. Instead, drivers remain at intermediate and lower levels of system abstraction, with many loops and iterations. The final finding is that current level crossing systems are inadvertently constraining some desirable behaviours, affording undesirable ones, and that unexpected system elements are driving behaviour in ways not previously considered. Railway level crossings need to be designed to reveal their functional purpose much more effectively than at present.

本文的目的是让铁路平交道口的用户成为灵活和自适应的决策者，并应用认知系统工程方法来发现基于行为的新见解，以提高安全性。在铁路平交道口/平交道口，火车与公路车辆之间的碰撞仍然是一个全球性问题。驾驶员为何会采取某些导致碰撞的行为，这一点尚不十分清楚，并且继续以新颖的方法和方法探索这一问题仍然有充分的理由。在这项研究中，对22位汽车驾驶员的220次平交道口遭遇进行了分析。驾驶员在沿预定路线驾驶仪表车时提供的并发口头协议将接受内容分析，并映射到拉斯穆森的抽象分解空间。出现了三个关键结果。首先，当他们意识到自己处在交叉路口的环境中时，驾驶员的自然倾向是寻找火车（即使不是必需的），放慢速度（再次，即使不是必需的），以及他们的行为受到各种各样的影响。限制和收费（铁路当局为此目的而放置了一些但不是全部）。第二个结果是，在这些情况下的专家决策并未描述从高级系统目的到低级物理对象的轨迹。相反，驱动程序停留在系统抽象的中级和较低级别，具有许多循环和迭代。最终发现是，当前的平交道口系统无意中限制了某些理想的行为，提供了不良的行为，以及意外的系统元素正在以以前未曾考虑的方式来驱动行为。需要设计铁路平交道口，以比目前更有效地揭示其功能目的。