European railways remain among the safest in the world, with major accidents (with five or more fatalities) becoming increasingly rare and significant accidents decreasing in recent years. However, the overall cost of railway accidents remains high, and progress has also been very uneven across the EU Member States, with a significant variation in safety levels. ERA’s Executive Director, Josef Doppelbauer, invites the sector to be strongly committed to enhancing railway safety by rigorously applying a robust safety management system and by implementing a positive railway safety culture: “ERA is actively fostering a common positive European railway safety culture, as safety is not only about regulations, rules and procedures. Safety is about a continuous and collective commitment.”
Collected data confirm that we have already come far in terms of improving the interoperability of railways in Europe, however, we are still a long way from reaching our targets in many areas. Although sound progress can be seen in aligning operational frameworks in terms of rules, only modest improvements are visible in making the railway assets interoperable. As a consequence, railways have been unable to increase their modal share in the transportation mix in the past decade, despite being the most sustainable mode of transport.
In this edition of the report, for the first time, thanks to our valuable collaboration with RailNetEurope, we present new indicators for monitoring cross-border rail traffic volumes, transfer time and punctuality at border sections, which may provide an indication on the seamlessness of international rail connections. “After years of building single-purpose databases, our focus must now shift towards synergies enabled by connected data and underlying IT systems, which can improve rail competitiveness”, says Josef Doppelbauer, inviting all parties involved “to boost their efforts towards achieving better data quality”.
The 2022 Report can be downloaded here.
