It was around 1 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon at Wards Corner. The red lights flashed, the bells rang and the bars lowered at the train tracks there. Traffic ground to a halt.
Ashley Washington was in the middle of giving an Uber passenger a ride when she got stuck at the crossing.
“It sucks, because sometimes you might be on a time crunch, you might have to get to work, or if I'm Ubering, the person I'm Ubering may have somewhere they need to be,” she said. “Unfortunately, the trains don't care about our time schedule.”
The drivers stretching across three lanes would wait for 9 minutes for the train to pass.
Even after the tracks were clear and the bars came up, traffic was noticeably more congested than it was before.
Andria McClellan heard these stories all the time during the eight and half years she served on Norfolk City Council. Blocked crossings made people late for work, appointments and school pickups. They delayed deliveries and added precious seconds to emergency response.
“It's really difficult because it's not on a schedule,” she said.
She launched the Oculus Rail app in October in Hampton Roads. The app is free to download. It uses AI and sensors to monitor crossings and alert drivers in real-time when crossings are blocked.
“When you're commuting or you're a delivery truck driver or an ambulance, every second is going to count, and so having this data at their fingertips is really, really helpful,” McClellan said.
Railroad crossings are an “increasingly common factor” in planning emergency response in Norfolk, said the city’s Fire-Rescue Battalion Chief Carrie Jones in an email.
“Delays from blocked crossings can impact Norfolk Fire-Rescue response times, but our units are trained to know their districts and use alternate routes,” Jones wrote. “In some cases, another unit can be added to respond to the incident from a location not affected by a train crossing.”
Currently, Oculus Rail has 40 sensors at crossings across Norfolk, Chesapeake, Suffolk and Portsmouth. The sensors are solar-powered and located in the public right-of-way, which reduced the need for permitting, McClellan said.
Oculus Rail installs and maintains the sensors. The participating municipalities pay for the data, which is free for the public to access, she said.
"We simply provide a very low-cost data plan on an annual basis to a city per crossing," she said. "We're talking $2,500 to $5,000 per year per crossing, versus a sensor that could cost, based on other estimates, anywhere from $100,000 to $200,000 per crossing."
Drivers can receive notifications for specific crossings at certain times of the day — such as before travelling to work and home. Cities can use the information to adjust traffic patterns and reduce congestion when a crossing is blocked, she said.
The app also collects historical data about individual crossings, such as how long crossings typically last. The average crossing at Norfolk’s Hampton Boulevard, where trains ferry cargo to and from the Port of Virginia, takes about three minutes. At Colonial Avenue in Ghent, trains carrying coal to and from Lamberts Point typically stop traffic for about nine and half minutes, according to Oculus Rail.
McClellan said her app can help a driver decide to wait out a crossing at a location with a shorter average wait time or reroute if they’re going to hit one with a longer wait.
This new data, which hasn’t been available to the public and cities before now, can help drivers and railroads coexist, she said.
“I'd rather see a container on a train than a truck on a highway, to be honest with you, in terms of the environment and congestion,” McClellan said. “The problem is that we just haven't had any data to also mitigate any congestion at blocked rail crossings.”
Hampton Roads has the highest concentration of railroad crossings in Virginia, which made it the perfect place to start, she said.
McClellan said her planned next steps include getting the data integrated into navigation apps, like Waze and Google Maps, and expanding to the Midwest.