Overview
The Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI) has been commissioned by The Swedish Transport Agency to analyse if the existing data can be used to estimate the level of safety of rail traffic in Sweden in a manner meeting the standards of the European commission. The analysis will show if the required information is available through the existing system, or if there is an increased need for data collection, and if so, what and how it should be collected. The commission also includes suggesting areas for further analysis.
In the report, first a short description of the Swedish Transport Agency’s internal IT-system TRAP event is given. In TRAP event, serious accidents, incidents, and significant errors/flaws reported by the operators, are registered. We also make an assessment of the feasibility of estimating safety measures, defined by the European Commission, from TRAP event data, rather than through an annual safety report from the operators as is done today. Then we will give suggestions as to how the existing follow-up of accidents and risk factors can be refined, which analytical models that are feasible, and finally give suggestions for further data collection to enable in-depth analyses.
Funding
Results
The Swedish Transport Agency has today a large amount of information about events, vehicles, companies and infrastructure stored in different registers in the TRAP system. If it were possible to access more of these variables using search terms, if the data from different register in a higher degree than today could be combined, both within
The Swedish Transport Agency and to databases managed by other agencies, more thorough analyses concerning incidents and accidents in rail traffic would be possible. However, today some information regarding many events is missing and more effort, both from The Swedish Transport Agency and the operators, is necessary in order to enable such analyses. Also, data regarding the common safety measures should be added to TRAP event to explore the relations between the safety measures, vehicle types, infrastructure, operators etc.
First and foremost, we recommend that Transport Agency puts resources to make a decision about what should be included in the assessment of the national safety level in rail traffic and what level it should be. From this it is possible to go ahead and do an analysis of what variables are needed and if these exist today (e. g. TRAP), if needed additions, how data should be collected, if cooperation is required with other authorities and if the operators should be involved in the process.