Co-written/researched w/ @SJ
For the past 3 years, your co-authors lived within a few blocks of a railroad crossing. Around five times a day (and usually at least once in the middle of the night), a train would blast through, blaring its horn for a long 30 second approach. We were probably 400 meters from the crossing, and we couldn’t leave the windows open at night or we’d be woken up. Most confusingly, that crossing had signals with the arms that come down across the road whenever a train comes, so no one was going to be driving across the tracks. Who is this horn for? How many people are at the crossing when they roll through at 3 AM? Surely blaring lights and descending gates should be enough for them to not be an idiot!
The noise really gets under your skin after a while, and we were bothered by the seeming uselessness of this constant annoyance, so we’ve gathered you here today for a little cost-benefit analysis on the evil that is the train horn. It sounds pretty trivial, but disrupted sleep, stress, and general annoyances aren’t! Multiply the suffering over 100,000 train crossings in the US and even a small cost at each one is going to add up. We couldn’t find any serious analysis* pitting the costs of loud train horns against their benefits (presumably a reduction in collisions/deaths), so we’re going to try our hand at one.
Let’s start with the basics. How easy would it be to just… not honk? Lots of people hate the honking. Does anyone think it’s necessary and do they really have to do this?
