In many places in the US, there are only flashing lights to indicate a train. Where I grew up in the rural midwest, this was very common on county roads routine

In many places in the US, there are only flashing lights to indicate a train. Where I grew up in the rural midwest, this was very common on county roads routinely with speed limits over 50mph. Even if aggressively starting the flashing lights early, there are just extremely common situations where you’re going 50mph just to keep safe with the flow of traffic and the light flashes at the wrong time and you can’t stop. It could easily result in accidents even for people who are very cautious of train crossings. In a lot of cases, the lack of an actual automated barrier is just down to budget & maintenance costs. The sparse communities can’t afford to pay to install them or maintain them, and there are too many train crossings that are too spread out rurally for the state to maintain them. If one of them malfunctioned there could be lawsuits, or it could block road traffic on critical county roads where the nearest possible alternate route might be tens of miles away, and the road is needed for school buses, emergencg vehicles, snow removal, etc. So in total these communities just accept the risk because it’s logistically intractable otherwise.