Making railways safer
When the European Railways Agency (ERA) was created in 2005, they found there was a lack of information on the safety history of railways across Europe.
The agency realised that knowing an accurate safety history was crucial to achieving their aim of providing safety advice and promoting interoperability between EU countries.
Andrew Evans, Professor of Transport Risk Management at Imperial, worked with the ERA through Imperial Consultants to develop a Europe-wide database of railway accidents.
“We did a feasibility study initially, to show that our method of getting the accident data was valid. We then worked with ERA over two years to compile the entire database.” explains Professor Evans.
The ERA work was in collaboration with the Lloyds Register Group, a long-standing independent risk management organisation. The Lloyd’s Register Group funds the Lloyd’s Register Educational Trust (LRET), a separate and independent charity supporting advances in science, engineering and technology education, training and research across the globe. Among many other activities, the LRET supports the Transport Risk Management Centre in the Centre for Transport Studies at Imperial.
Together they concentrated on the more severe railway accidents. No easy way to collect that data exists and so the project used commercial databases of news agencies to find information on the accidents. Railway accidents are always newsworthy and 85% of the data was found this way. The final 15% of data was supplied by the national rail safety bodies of the European countries.
The data from this commercial project is openly available online. Professor Evans has published papers analysing the data. It’s being used by the ERA and organisations throughout Europe to find out how well the railways are doing and compare their past history to future improvements.
Expert witness
As a result of his expertise in collecting and analysing data, Professor Evans has also been asked to act as an expert witness for railway safety inquiries after major railway accidents in the UK.
His evidence centres on using data to analyse accident frequencies and consequently estimate risks. Enquiries are also often interested in the economics of safety, making judgements on what safety measures are worthwhile.
For more information on how Imperial Consultants can help your organisation in transport safety assessments, please contact us.
