Fact Sheet 10 - Road versus rail -
Rail safety costs, value for money?
This note is from Inquiry Evidence. The detail is superseded
by the arithmetic in the summary. The main changes are (a)
the cost of the system is now quoted as £3.6 billion,
not £6 billion (b) maintenance costs have been included
adding £180 million to the annual spend. The conclusion
is not effected to any significant extent. The inquiry note
provided:
....……….. This note suggests that for every
life (plus the associated lesser casualties) saved on the
railways 30 to 40 lives (plus their associated lesser casualties)
may have been sacrificed on the roads or elsewhere.
- The latest reported cost of the proposed safety systems
for national rail is £6 billion. If the system lasts
30 years then, with the interest rate set to 6%, the annual
cost of the £6 billion is £435 million per year.
That annual costs is net of maintenance and will save train
accidents only.
- Over the 18 years ending 1999 an average of 6 passengers
per year were killed in train accidents. Data suggests that
that should perhaps be increased by 15% to allow for staff.
If half would be saved by the signaling system we are left
with 3.5 fatalities per year saved.
- Facts sheet 04 suggests that fatalities in train accidents
account for only 22% of casualty costs in train accidents,
the rest being attributable to serious and slight injuries.
The value of a life is set at £922,874, at the 2000
price base, by the Government. Hence the value of the casualties
saved per year will be approximately: 3.5 x 922,874 / 0.22
= £14.7 million.
- It follows that the annual capital cost of the system,
£435 million, will exceed the annual value of the
casualties saved, £14.7 million, by a factor of at
least 30; an amazing misuse of public or private money if
ever there was one.
- If the recent newspaper reports, suggesting a saving
of some 80 fatalities over 40 years, are to be believed
then, instead of the 3.5 fatalities per year saved suggest
above, the system may save only 2. In that case the annual
cash value of the saving is £8.4 million, 41 times
less than the annual cost of the capital.
- That implies a great loss of life and limb elsewhere,
such as in our hospitals or on the roads. E.g. the casualty
cost per fatality on the roads is £2.8 million at
2000 prices (note this is not the cost of a fatality; instead
it is the cost per fatality of the fatality plus all the
associated lesser casualty types). Hence to justify an annual
expenditure of £435 million on the roads there would
have to be 155 lives saved (plus the associated lesser injuries).
Not a good comparison - for all roads the relative casualty
rates Fatal/Serious/Slight will be different from rail.
- Meanwhile, road traffic on motorways and trunk roads
require no, or virtually no, signals at all.
August 2002
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