Pickup driver drives through crossing gates in Wakefield - train plows into vehicle

The driver is 70. He's not swimming in the gene pool any more.

winning of the Stupidity Act of the Year Award.

Wow, a vision test every fifteen years. What a hardship! That shit takes 2 minutes. You can't take 2 minutes every fifteen years to potentially save an innocent persons life? Car drivers are such entitled babies.

As the roads are a shared resource, on which there is very little an individual driver can to do protect him/herself against people with medical or other conditions that impair their ability to safely operate a vehicle, what would you recommend? If there isn't going to be even minimal enhanced scrutiny to ensure that some drivers are still fit to be behind the wheel, should we require that they drive fluorescent orange vehicles so the rest of us can at least have some warning that, notwithstanding the state's reluctance to restrict the apparently God-given right to drive a vehicle, this person might present enhanced risk?

As you know, the state already has such restrictions - e.g., for persons who suffered a seizure regardless of age - however, the often depend on (nearly non-existent) self-reporting.

You know what is a terrible idea? Being ok with the status quo which is drivers killing 33,000 people in the US every year. Drivers take no responsibility for the death they cause. You should be getting a physical every 5 years anyway so you can't take one hour per five years to prove you are able to drive a 2 ton dangerous weapon? Pretty pathetic.

That No Left Turn sign is for the people exiting the strip mall in the northeast quadrant of the crossing. There is supposed to be an identical sign facing the industrial driveway, but it's obviously gone missing.

No, there logically wouldn't need to be a no left turn sign there because we generally expect drivers not to be stupid enough to turn into oncoming traffic. It's expected to be common knowledge that on roads with medians, you drive on the right side of it. If you're on an intersecting side street, and there's no break in the median, you don't turn left anyway and drive the wrong way until the next opportunity to cross over (although, this is Massachusetts......). Plus, you know, the yellow line is kinda a hint.

fully lowered at Broadway and when the train arrives at the crossing are about one minute for inbound trains and about two minutes for outbound trains (yes, I actually timed it with a stopwatch at one point). I was once told that the lead times on this and other crossings between Malden and Reading are so long because the Western Route Main Line is the designated detour route for the Amtrak Downeaster.

that say "No Stopping On the Tracks". That's a good thing to do, imho. More places should follow suit, and so should more drivers, as well.

I've lived here for over a dozen years now. The previous tenants of my apartment left a note by the door when they moved out with the MBTA CR dispatcher's number on it, because this happened frequently even then. And we've been pretty good about reporting it (although sometimes it's hard to give a shit because it feels like the MBTA doesn't).

If you only go through this crossing during rush hour, you may have lucked out. There seems to be a tendency for it to fail late at night (my GF works from home, and she confirms that's not just my bias from not being in the house during the day). Three weekends ago, it failed on three consecutive nights, each time after 10:30pm (once after mindnight), and each time it took over an hour for a repairman to be dispatched and resolve the issue.

And, to return us to the original question: each time, until Somerville PD had a detail on scene to keep people from being adventurous, some fraction of drivers would go around the gates.