Ministry for the Ecological Transition

Directorate for statistical data and studies (SDES)

Departement for Transport Statistics

Services des Données et des Etudes Statistiques

Tour Sequoia

1 place Carpeaux

92055 Paris - La Défense Cedex

Mandatory data collection at EU level is based on legal act, the Regulation EU 2018/643 and covers goods and passengers.
Data is collected as following:

• Annex I (annual data) –goods transport ,
• Annex II (annual data)–passenger transport,
• Annex III – (quarterly data) goods and passengers,
• Annex IV and V( data every five years) regional statistics on goods and passengers and rail network and
• Annex VIII (annual data) goods and passengers transport for small undertakings.

Goods transported by rail are classified according to the 20 divisions of goods following the 'Standard Goods Classification for Transport Statistics 2007’ with effect from reference year 2008.

The codes of regions used in the region-to-region statistics are indicated in Regulation (EC) 1059/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council.

Railway undertakings providing transport of passengers or goods.

The main concepts used in rail domain are:

Rail passenger means any person, excluding members of the train crew, who makes a trip by rail. For accident statistics, passengers trying to embark/disembark onto/from a moving train are included.
Passenger-km means the unit of measure representing the transport of one passenger by rail over a distance of one kilometer. Only the distance on the national territory of the reporting country shall be taken into account.
Weight means the quantity of goods in tonnestones (1 000 kilograms). The weight to be taken into consideration includes, in addition to the weight of the goods transported, the weight of packaging and the tare weight of containers, swap bodies, pallets as well as road vehicles transported by rail in the course of combined transport operations. If the goods are transported using the services of more than one railway undertaking, when possible the weight of goods shall not be counted more than once.
Tonne-km means the unit of measure of goods transport which represents the transport of one tonne (1 000 kilograms) of goods by rail over a distance of one kilometer. Only the distance on the national territory of the reporting country shall be taken into account.
Train means one or more railway vehicles hauled by one or more locomotives or railcars, or one railcar travelling alone, running under a given number or specific designation from an initial fixed point to a terminal fixed point. A light engine, that is to say, a locomotive travelling on its own, is not considered to be a train.
Train-km means the unit of measure representing the movement of a train over one kilometre. The distance used is the distance actually run, if available, otherwise the standard network distance between the origin and destination shall be used. Only the distance on the national territory of the reporting country shall be taken into account.

The data used in the domain are collected at railway companies level.

Data on passenger and freight transport are collected from the railway undertakings operating at national territory within thresholds mentioned in the rail regulation.
Data on traffic are collected from infrastructure managers and railway undertakings.

Operational railway network on national territory.

Data on passengers and goods are covered from 2004 onwards.

Not applicable.

The volume and performance of rail freight traffic are measured in tonnes (mass) and tonne-kilometres. Passenger transport by rail is measured in the number of passengers and in passenger-kilometres. Information on the number of train kilometres is also available.
Traffic flows on the rail network are measured in number of trains - passenger, freight and others (optional)

The tables consist mostly of annual data. There are some tables providing quarterly and quinquennial (every five years) data.

According to the Rail regulation (EU) 2018/643 data is collected as following: Annual data
– Annex I –goods transport collected for a reference period of one year with a deadline for data transmission as 5 months after the reference periodreference period,
– Annex II –passenger transport, yearly data with eight months deadline after the end of reference period
– Annex III – quarterly data for goods and passengers with a deadline of three months after the end of the reference period,
– Annex IV and V data every five years on regional statistics on goods and passengers and rail network with deadline of 12 respectively 18 months after the end of reference period and
– Annex VIII goods and passengers transport for small undertakings with 5 respectively 8 months deadline after the end of reference period.

National Level :

Articles R1211-1 to R1211-15 of the Transport Code codifying access to information relating to rail traffic and economic data necessary for conducting studies and research

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/section_lc/LEGITEXT000023086525/LEGISCTA000028996315/#LEGISCTA000028996315

European Level :

Not applicable

National level:

•  Law no.51-711 of 7 June 1951(amended) on legal obligation, coordination and confidentiality in the field of statistics defines statistical confidentiality, its limits and conditions of application.
•  Article L.311-8 of the French Code of Public Relations between thepublic and general government

European level:

• (recital 24 and Article 20(4)) of 11 March 2009 (OJ L 87, p. 164), stipulates the need to establish common principles and guidelines ensuring the confidentiality of data used for the production of European statistics and the access to those confidential data with due account for technical developments and the requirements of users in a democratic society.

The flag of confidentiality indicates if data provided is considered confidential by the Member State or not (confidentiality laws no 322/97, Art. 13 §1 and no 1588/90, Art. 2).

Council Regulation (EC) no 322/97, Art. 13 § 1:

Data used by the national authorities and the Community authority for the production of Community statistics shall be considered confidential when they allow statistical units to be identified, either directly or indirectly, thereby disclosing individual information. To determine whether a statistical unit is identifiable, account shall be taken of all the means that might reasonably be used by a third party to identify the said statistical unit.

Council Regulation (EC) no 1588/90, Art. 2:

For the purposes of this Regulation, the terms given below are defined as follows:

- confidential statistical data: data declared confidential by the Member States in line with national legislation or practices governing statistical confidentiality;
- national authorities: national statistical institutes and other national bodies responsible for the collection and use of statistics for the Communities;
- information on the private lives of natural persons: information on the private and family lives of natural persons as defined by national legislation or practices in the various Member States;
- use for statistical purposes: use exclusively for the compilation of statistical tables or for statistical economic analyses; may not be used for administrative, legal or tax purposes or for verification against the units surveyed;
- statistical unit: basic unit covered by statistical data transmitted to the Statistical Office of European Community (Eurostat);
- direct identification: identification of a statistical unit from its name or address, or from an officially allocated and published identification number;
- indirect identification: possibility of deducing the identity of a statistical unit other than from the information mentioned in point 6;
- officials of the SOEC: officials of the Communities, within the meaning of Article 1 of the Staff Regulations of Officials of the European Communities, working at the SOEC;
- other staff of the SOEC: servants of the Communities, within the meaning of Articles 2 to 5 of the Conditions of Employment of Other Servants of the European Communities, working at the SOEC;
- dissemination: supply of data in any form whatever: publications, access to databases, microfiches, telephone communications, etc.

The national authorities shall make a request to such undertakings for permission to disclose the required data and shall inform Eurostat of the result of this request when data are transmitted to Eurostat.
Confidentiality of the data is based on Member State's judgment.

Council Regulation (EC) no 1588/90, Art. 3:

The national authorities shall be authorised to transmit confidential statistical data to the SOEC.

- National rules on statistical confidentiality may not be invoked to prevent the transmission of confidential statistical data to the SOEC where an act of Community law governing a Community statistic provides for the transmission of such data.
- Transmission to the SOEC of confidential statistical data on the structure and activity of undertakings, collected before the entry into force of this Regulation, must be carried out in accordance with the rules and practices on statistical confidentiality in force in the Member States.
- Transmission to the SOEC of confidential statistical data, within the meaning of paragraph 2, shall be carried out in such a way that statistical units cannot be directly identified. This does not preclude the admissibility of more far-reaching transmission rules in accordance with the legislation of the Member States.
- National authorities shall not be obliged to transmit information on the private lives of natural persons to the SOEC if the information transmitted could enable those persons to be identified either directly or indirectly.

According to he Directive 2009/42/EC of the European Parliament and the council of 6 May 2009, the transmission of the results shall take place within five months of the end of the period of observation for data of quarterly periodicity, within five months for data of annual goodsperiodicity, within eight months for data of annual passengers periodicity, and within two years for the quinquennial periodicity.

Eurostat shall disseminate appropriate statistical data with a periodicity comparable to that of the results transmitted.

The calendar is disseminated on the Eurostat website (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/main/news/release-calendar?start=1665352800000&type=dayGridWeek)

The data are disseminated on Eurostat's databases (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database).

Dissemination to EUROSTAT: the tables consist mostly of annual data. There are some tables providing quarterly and quinquennial (every five years) data.

According to the Rail regulation (EU) 2018/643 data is collected as following: Annual data
– Annex I –goods transport collected for a reference period of one year with a deadline for data transmission as 5 months after the reference periodreference period,
– Annex II –passenger transport, yearly data with eight months deadline after the end of reference period
– Annex III – quarterly data for goods and passengers with a deadline of three months after the end of the reference period,
– Annex IV and V data every five years on regional statistics on goods and passengers and rail network with deadline of 12 respectively 18 months after the end of reference period and
– Annex VIII goods and passengers transport for small undertakings with 5 respectively 8 months deadline after the end of reference period.stat

Data are available here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/transport/data/database

Dissemination on SDES Website: https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/

Annualy :

- the Annual Transports Report, about 10 months after the reference year: https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/bilan-annuel-des-transports-en-2020

- shortly, we will also publish a specific web page for rail freight transport, with more data than in the annual transport report.

Quaterly :

- short-term transport statistics : https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/conjoncture-des-transports-0

 News on Eurostat website : https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/main/news/euro-indicators

 Release calendar on Eurostat website : https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/main/news/release-calendar?start=1665352800000&type=dayGridWeek&theme=7#

Online publications :

Railway Freight : https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Railway_freight_transport_statistics

Railway passengers : https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Railway_passenger_transport_statistics_-_quarterly_and_annual_data

This link : https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/transport/data/database

Then select Railway Transport.

 Not applicable.

Internet adress : https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/29567/3217334/Reference_manual_for_rail_transport_statistics%E2%80%93version_10.4_%282021_edition%29.pdf/b152c85c-11d6-cff4-a1a8-d34bd4cac839?t=1610708187248

Data are collected directly from Railway Companies in compliance with the methodology and classifications specified in the legal framework on European Level.

Quality assurance framework for the RailwayTransport Statistics is based on the ES CoP, the European Statistics Code of Practice adopted by the Statistical Programme Committee on 24 February 2005 and revised by the European Statistical System Committee in September 2011 and in November 2017. The European Statistics Code of Practice sets the standard for developing, producing and disseminating European statistics, along the lines of the institutional environment, statistical processes and statistical output. 

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/quality/european-quality-standards/european-statistics-code-of-practice

Statistical authorities, comprising Eurostat, the National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) and Other National Authorities (ONAs) responsible for the development, production and dissemination of European Statistics, are strongly committed to quality – this commitment and high quality awareness are clearly expressed in the Quality Declaration of the ESS that is also included in the Preamble of the CoP.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/64157/4373735/01-ESS-quality-declaration.pdf/af730008-cc68-4a00-834e-82b09e3a5f0e

The  Quality Assurance Framework of the European Statistical System (ESS QAF) complements and breaks further down the Code of Practice.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/fr/web/quality/european-quality-standards/quality-assurance-framework

There is a set of validation rules and quality checks put in place, which detect various types of issues. In case of any issues detected, the data providers are contacted by Eurostat to provide explanations or/and revise the data accordingly.

The data providers then check the data, and return to the Railway companies if needed.

The Railway Transport Statistics covers the information needs of different groups of users, among wich are different organizations, Public Administration, territorial administrations, private companies, media, researchers and universities, private enterprises and individuals.

Eurostat conducts two types of evaluations that assess Eurostat's performance in general, and one of them are the User Satisfaction Surveys. The report for 2020 : https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/64157/4375449/Report_USS_2020.pdf

SDES is committed in understanding who the users of the statistics it produces are, what the data needs are, whether they match production and if the statistics produced fulfill the needs of users.

To this aim SDES is constantly in contact with key users of the statistics (among them national authorities, professional organization for French transport, public statistics, ...) discussing results and new needs from both sides.

All mandatory data requested by Regulation 2018/643 are transmitted :

The overall accuracy is considered to be good, notably when data are compared with other sources, such as statistics compiled by ART (Autorité de Régulation des Transports).

Not applicable for Rail transport collection.

a) Coverage errors

When a Railway Company doesn't respond in times, estimations are done. It's rare and usually concern low freight companies.

When a new Railway Company starts its activity on national territory, some difficulties to contact it may appears, and concepts may take time to be well understood.

b) Measurement errors

Some marginal errors may occur as a result of codification errors by Railway Companies. For example, a large share of so-called “other” instead of specific codes for type of goods. The distance reference can be different in the information system from a Railway Company to another. This is also the case for the UIC codes that we use to create the NUTS variables (some that don't exist, or are false), some of them are corrected when possible. The Railway Companies can have difficulties to collect from their clients all the information the statistics need (number of UTI, ...).

c) Processing errors

Some ajustements has to be done when a Railway Company can't give all the information the statistics need, or when there is an obvious error: in that case, confirmation is requested from the Railway Company, which can return corrected data, or adjustments are applied.

According to he Directive 2009/42/EC of the European Parliament and the council of 6 May 2009, the transmission of the results shall take place within five months of the end of the period of observation for data of quarterly periodicity, within five months for data of annual goodsperiodicity, within eight months for data of annual passengers periodicity, and within two years for the quinquennial periodicity.

Eurostat shall disseminate appropriate statistical data with a periodicity comparable to that of the results transmitted.

The deadliness for transmission are usually respected.

Geographical comparability is obtained via the application of common concepts and validation rules. The harmonised interpretation of the methodology is enhanced by the organisation of regular meeting of the Working Group on Rail Transport Statistics, where all reporting countries are represented.

However, an effort remains to be made, with the collaboration of other countries, on the mirror checks provided by Eurostat.

There is one significant break in the series of Railway Freight statistics :

- a significant operator is missing before 2015 (from 2005).

Cross domain data comparison (for different modes of transport) is not always possible. For instance, maritime transport statistics are not yet teritorialised like the other modes of transport (IWW, road, railway, aviation). A consultation of the member states has been conducted by Eurostat in 2020 within the framework of the WG on Maritime trasnport staistics in order to get their views on the use of a specific method based on a distance matrix and the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ).

Once the use of this method will be approved it will be possible to include maritime transport in modal split indicators and thus enable cross domain comparisons.

Each set of results is internally made consistent. For example, quarterly data are made consistent with annual data during annual collection.

The cost of compilation is not very high because it uses a computer chain, with recovery programs (which may need to be completed over the collections). The most time-consuming may be the various exchanges with the railway companies, when necessary.

SDES revision policy is reported at the following link :

https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/2020-07/politique_revision_sdes_0.pdf

The datasets reported quaterly can be revised once a year when annual datasets are transmitted.

The datasets reported annualy can be revised when necessary, or on the occasion of Annex IV (every five years).

Data are collected by SDES using railway companies information system as a data source.

Quaterly, annual and quinquennial.

Data collection using a template spreadsheet (one for the quaterly data, one for the annual data) and transmission using a dedicated functionnal mailbox with restricted access.

Data are validated using automated programs, which produce some outputs : modalities of variables, consistency over time, intra datasets, interdatasets. Some manual checks can also be done if necessary.

If surprising developments or declarations are detected, a return is made to the railway undertakings concerned for validation or correction.

When compiling the data of different railway companies, estimation might be used when necessary, for example when a companies don't respond in time. Generally, these estimations concern low weight railway undertakings.

Automatic adjustments, general or specific (terms, values, ...), are also applied, and some variables are created.

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