Post date: Nov 04, 2017 6:28:27 PM
 While I was tweaking my program this morning I decided take a good look at what 27 days of collecting data could show us.
The worst trains are the longer ones, naturally. Five minutes doesn't sound like much, but when you're just sitting in the car looking at the bumper of the car in front of you and you have someplace you want to be, well, it can seem like a really long time. Factor in that the traffic needs to clear when the trains gone, and it can seem like an even longer time indeed. Heaven forbid you need to turn left just past the tracks, it can be another five minutes just waiting on the traffic coming the other way to clear so you can make the turn.
So here we are: In 27 days we've had 178 trains between 5 minutes and 10 minutes long, an average of 6.59 per day. Looking at the chart they're fairly evenly distributed.
Next I looked at trains longer than 10 minutes. These are the show stoppers, the ones to make you late for wherever you were going. I found 27 such trains, an average of one per day. But these weren't distributed as evenly. A four day stretch from the 19th to the 22nd we had none. On the 14th there were 4 of them, one almost 3 hours long. I'm glad that one was in the middle of the night!
Now I love trains, mostly the steam locomotives and the old F9's, but when we talk about the benefits trains bring, we should also keep in mind the downsides. When, as in the case here, that some days 1,700 vehicles or more at a single crossing have to sit still for a train to pass, some of them for over ten minutes, that's not a benefit. It's a cost that needs to be factored into the equation.
Which is, I guess, why I started this project in the first place.