Safety data and performance
We are working in a cost-constrained railway in a cost-constrained world. We must allocate scarce resources effectively and deliver value for money. This means we need to make difficult decisions to deliver a healthy, safe, resilient, and high performing railway. Safety doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A change affecting safety may also affect performance and the experience of passengers or freight customers.
Making the best use of scarce resources
Good safety data can help us prioritise what’s most important. It can prevent reliance on knee jerk reactions. It can reveal what our priorities should be and how to address them.
The Rail Health and Safety Strategy used data and expert input from across the railway to identify where to focus collaborative activity to improve health and safety management.
Good safety data, and the risk modelling it supports, helps us identify when we should invest in a measure to improve safety. It can also show us when we shouldn’t. Previous cross-industry work on train door retro-fitment found that the cost would be grossly disproportionate to the safety benefit. This prevented up to £50m of additional costs.
Safety and performance
Sometimes we need to make decisions that involve trade-offs between safety, cost, and performance. But often they go together: it’s generally true that a high performing railway is a safe railway.
We use data to explore the correlation between delays, cancellations, and safety risk. Our knock-on risk model estimates how unwanted events, such as slips, trips and falls in stations, workforce assaults or SPADs, increase when trains are disrupted. Crowded stations, frustrated people, and disrupted service patterns can all increase safety risk.
The knock-on risk model helped us to understand, from a whole system perspective, the best course of action when the radio or other on-train equipment fails. This might not be immediately slowing or stopping trains. And if slowing trains is the right thing to do, which speed strikes the right balance between direct and knock-on risk? We are also using the knock-on risk model in PRIMA. This tool balances the direct risk from soil cutting failures with the performance and knock-on risk impact of imposing speed restrictions.
Safety and cost
An old adage is: ’if you think safety is expensive, try having an accident!’
The freight sector has invested heavily its time and resources in understanding and addressing derailment risk. Fortunately, the accidents that have sharpened the focus on this topic over the past decade have not resulted in serious casualties. But they have led to major environmental damage, significant disruption, and large costs. Reducing freight train derailments is good for safety, enhances the sector’s reputation, and brings wider benefits. The sector is taking a data-led approach to make sure future work is targeted at where it will bring most benefit across these different dimensions.
Future developments
We’re already exploiting ‘big data’ and new data tools and techniques. For instance, we’re working on upgrading and adding new functionality to our Red Aspect Approaches to Signals toolkit (RAATS). This estimates the number of times a signal is approached at red. In future, we will be able to dig deeper into the data and view it from the train service perspective. This will tell us more about where, when, and why delays are being incurred so we can address pinch points.
We’ve also started a future risk modelling capability research programme. This will build on the cutting-edge data-driven techniques we already use in our Safety Risk Model (SRM). It will extend this capability so complex decisions can be based on a more holistic understanding of safety, cost, and performance. We’re working on projects to model performance impact, accident cost, and asset degradation and maintenance. Watch out for further updates.
Taking safe decisions
We’ve always recognised that decisions that impact safety risk often have wider effects. Our Taking Safe Decisions guidance is about making decisions that protect safety, satisfy legal requirements, and meet wider business objectives. A risk and evidence-based approach to safety management helps ensure we prioritise what is most important. It also helps us take decisions based on a robust understanding of all the costs and benefits.
Cost pressures make good safety management more important than ever. Our strong record on safety and sustainability gives us a competitive advantage over other modes of transport. We need to work hard to maintain this. We must also deliver the performance and value for money that our passengers and freight customers need. Safety data will help us deliver safety, performance, and value.
