The tabulation in this update extends the previous by the addition of rows 5, 5(a) and 5(b) and by longer period data for the road casualties, as noted in the tabulation.

The Railway lobby has succeeded in imbedding in the minds of the public and politicians that rail is overwhelmingly safe compared with road. E.g. Sir Robert Horton said in Railtrack's annual report of 1998/9 that rail is "27 times as safe as road in terms of fatalities and serious injuries" and in the Transport Committee's report, The Future of the Railway (House of Commons) we read "the figures comparing road and rail fatalities are telling .The SRA points out that on average more road users die in accidents each day than rail passengers in a year". We point out that those statements exaggerate rail safety by a factor of 18 or by 1,700% by ignoring usage and by further amounts by selective reporting. In realty the rail safety myth has no basis as illustrated below.

There are two constituencies, namely (a) casualties to passengers and (b) total, or system-wide, casualties i.e. including pedestrians for roads and trespassers (but not suicides) for rail. Headline data follows where the casualty rates are per billion passenger-km and where the casualty cost rates are £ per million passenger-km. Greater detail is tabulated. Even greater detail is available by request. All the data should be read in conjunction with the notes following the headlines.

Headlines.

1. The death rate to rail passengers in the envelope bounded by the ticket barriers is 0.397, double the corresponding rate, 0.198, suffered by passengers in buses and coaches on non-urban roads. If the envelopes of interest are drawn more tightly so as to be bounded by boarding and alighting then the death rates are 0.264 for rail and 0.164 for bus and coach. This headline is subject to the caveat at note (m)
2. System-wide, including trespassers but not suicides, the death rate by rail is 3.94, more than double that on the motorway network, namely 1.69.
3. The death rate to passengers in cars is 2.8 (all roads)
4. The death rate on motorways and non-built up A-roads is 5.2. If pedestrians, cyclist and motorcyclists are excluded then the death rate is 3.75, suggesting that if road vehicles enjoyed a segregated network as do trains the death rate by road would be less than the death rate of 3.94 for the national rail system.
5. The Killed and Seriously Injured casualty cost rate suffered by passengers by rail is £1,970, 3 times as high as for passengers plus drivers in buses and coaches on non-urban roads, namely £667. These values exclude the costs from falling down steps and escalators. If such falls are include then, subject to the caveat at note (f), the rail casualty costs per billion passenger-km to passengers nearly doubles, rising to £3,570. However, there is no comparable data for people travelling by bus and coach although, intuitively stairs and escalators are relatively rare in bus stations or at other set down points.
6. Most rail safety publicity ignores all casualties except deaths to passengers in Train Accidents. E.g. excluded are deaths from falling out of trains, boarding and alighting etc. However, casualty costs attributable to passengers killed in train accidents amount to only 11% of the Killed or Seriously Injured costs suffered by passengers in the envelope bounded by the ticket barriers and 3% of all rail KSI casualty costs. These percentages ignore the casualty costs from falling down escalators and stairs or from slipping on packages or being hit by barrows. If those classes of accident are included the 11% falls to 6% and the 3% falls to 2.5%. Indeed if the casualty costs associated with the category "serious" are robust, see note (f), then the casualty costs attributable to Killed and Seriously injured from falling down steps and escalators are nearly 8 times the casualty costs from the category Killed in a Train Accident.

Notes:

Tabulation: Summary casualty rates and costs

Note: this data differs from the previous version by:

The data for roads cannot at present be extended beyond 2001 because the DfT has replaced the previous road categories of "Built up" and "Non-Built up", which were actually speed limit related, by Rural and Urban, which are population related - roads in settlement of less than 10,000 population being categorised as rural despite the speed limits.

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