i was slightly stunned that this is not common sense: "experiments show that humans are really bad at judging the speed of an oncoming train at a crossing until

i was slightly stunned that this is not common sense: "experiments show that humans are really bad at judging the speed of an oncoming train at a crossing until it's nearly arrived" if you've ever seen this at e.g a train station even, is painfully obvious that your perception of this is terrible - trains in the distance look really slow. level crossings have been very common here in the uk for a long time... open crossings are the exception rather than the rule, and you have to go far out of your way to find them.