Government inaction blamed for tragedy at Kerang

Safety Institute of Australia (SIA) has condemned government inaction as the reason for the tragic level crossing collision near Kerang earlier this week.

"While it is too early to say what the final links in the chain of events were that led to the collision near Kerang, key systemic causes of the tragedy can be determined even without the need to leave the office," said SIA national president Dr Geoff Dell.

Dell said level crossings should be designed to be more "fail safe', so a collision could still be avoided in the event of a failure or error.

"All the better level crossing designs applied today across Australia are not fail safe and many of the others are not safe at all," he said.

"Despite the major technological advances we have experienced across most facets of society, design standards applied to railway level crossings have not changed appreciably in the last 50 years."

Dell said that unless something is done about the poor design of Australia's crossings, terrible accidents like the one last Tuesday are going to happen more often.

"The frequency of these events can be expected to rise in Australia with the number of trains and road vehicles in use, unless state and federal governments focus on finding step change solutions," he said.

"Although available for many years, intelligent vehicle and other related technologies have not been developed and integrated into the road safety environment. What's lacking is the governments' will to develop and make use of them. At the moment, you can just about count on one hand the number of research dollars being committed to finding fail-safe solutions to this and other major road safety problems."