STOP! Rail Road Crossing ahead!!!!

"Marketplace" on National Public Radio last evening featured a report on the efforts of the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to convince technology companies to incorporate the locations of more than 200,000 railroad crossings in their maps and to warn drivers when they are approaching one. The goal of such an initiative will be to save 200 lives annually.

NPR Report: https://www.marketplace.org/2017/02/06/tech/why-doesnt-your-driving-app-show-railroad-crossings

The effort has been ongoing for more than a year, led by FRA Administrator Sarah Feinberg a former Facebook communications director. The NTSB joined the effort after a crash in February 2015 which took the life of a railroad engineer after a truck driver turned onto railroad tracks in Oxnard, California and became stuck.

The "Marketplace" report notes that navigation application and device maker Garmin is the only company that has so far integrated railroad crossing alerts into its devices. The reporter notes that he is unable to find any smartphone-based mobile app that provides such alerts from the likes of Google or Apple.

The strange thing about this situation is that the technology to solve the problem has existed for more than a decade from a company called Global Mobile Alert (GMA). GMA has the solution for integrating the locations of signaled intersections, school zones and railroad crossings into a navigation app for the purpose of alerting a driver who may be distracted by a mobile phone call.

Global Mobile Alert in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNzikHwuGBM

Source; Roger Lanctot

White paper available here let's talk. https://www.strategyanalytics.com/contact-strategy-analytics/conferences/SA?a0=GMA01

Source: Global Mobile Alert https://www.globalmobilealert.com