There is still some ways to go for vehicles to be fully autonomous and one of the major reasons is that they are not yet able to recognise all the dangers on the road. Remember the time when the Tesla thought a horse-drawn carriage was a truck? Or that the moon was a yellow traffic light?
The clever people at Ford thought that, hey, maybe we had better teach our cars to recognise trains. Yes, they had.
The company has filed a new patent for locomotive detection by their autonomous cars. Ford proposed two steps that will enable the car to do so: the first would be sensors on the train tracks that can detect before and after the car crosses the tracks. The second and primary one would be detectors on the car that can read train crossing signals and detect the crossbar. Together, the car will, on paper, be able to tell when the train has completely passed the crossing or even if it, for whatever reason, has stopped on the tracks or is reversing.
Well, good luck installing sensors on every railroad crossing that exists. According to one source, there are over half a million railroad crossings in the world.
However, it may not be any better leaving it to humans—apparently, violations are quite common and fatalities from train-car accidents are no uncommon. The Federal Railway Administration (FRA) in the USA once conducted a survey amongst violators of railroad crossing rules, and the majority of them claimed to not have seen the warning signals—ie. flashing lights and lowering crossbar. Of course you didn’t.
