Campaign for railway crossing safety

Apparently there is a new national campaign to improve safety at railway crossings, being introduced today. The BBC has an article here:

There is a railway crossing near where I live which was, until 2004, perfectly safe and introduced no more than a few minutes delay to a journey. The vast majority of drivers were quite content to wait for the trains.

Two years ago the whole crossing was re-built, new gates and lights added, and the time delay before a train crosses was doubled to nearly 5 minutes.

Now we have the ridiculous situation where large traffic queues are building up, pedestrians & cyclists run the risk of injury due to impatient drivers using local rat-runs that avoid the crossing, residents living near the crossing are worried about exhaust fumes polluting their environment, and, most worrying of all, I have recently seen several "chicken run" drivers dodging around the gates rather than waiting for the train to (eventually) go past.

Letters have been written to the local council and Railtrack (Network Rail), and all the replies simply come back stating that "health & safety regulations require the longer delays".

...But it is the longer delays which are the very cause of the safety problems. If the railway crossing delays were reduced to (say) only 1 minute before the train arrives, then there would be little or no incentive for drivers to take potentially suicidal actions.

My 5 cents worth, anyway.....

MH