Europe has come a long way in making travelling in Europe safer for people. In the decade between 1999 and 2009, transport-related deaths fell by about 37%. This is attributable to a number of interrelated policies, including improved infrastructure, more research and development, innovative technologies, awareness-raising campaigns and legal changes.

Yet despite these impressive improvements, Europe’s roads, railways, skies and seas continue to claim thousands of lives each year, with transport accidents the largest single cause of death in the 15-29 age group. Road accidents alone killed more than 34 000 Europeans in 2009. This means that there still remains considerable scope for improvement.

As part of this effort, the EU-funded EXCROSS project has identified ways in which researchers on all transport modes can do a better job of coordinating their research, addressing common problems and sharing their knowledge with each other and policymakers.

“A huge opportunity for improving the EU’s transport safety level lies in enhancing the cross-fertilisation among different transport modes, by addressing common problems, overlapping areas, and re-applying lessons learnt in one domain to others,” says project coordinator Simone Pozzi, an expert in transport safety research at Deep Blue, a consultancy in Italy.

EXCROSS, which ended on December 2013, focused on analysing past and ongoing European safety initiatives and projects so as to identify synergies and opportunities for new insights into transport safety.

“Safety research is currently fragmented across the different transport modes, with the same problems being addressed separately in different transport modes,” explains Deep Blue’s Sara Silvagni, a human factors and safety expert. “This should not be the case, as issues like evacuation in case of emergencies, or the design of the support systems for drivers and pilots, or the management of their fatigue and workload, would greatly benefit from a coordinated approach.”

Safety first

The first step EXCROSS took was to ensure that all project partners possessed a common understanding of safety principles and issues. The project also identified all the relevant stakeholders for the various modes of transportation.

The EXCROSS team settled on seven areas where it thought coordinating research would yield the most benefits for cross-fertilisation. These were certification, dangerous goods, fatigue, training, incident and accident investigation, safety culture enhancement, and safety assessments.

The project screened 300 projects, out of which 73 safety-related research projects addressing more than one mode of transport were analysed and classified. The results of the analysis were summarised into 32 safety tips which can be used to direct future research efforts – long- and short-term – across the various transport modes.

“EXCROSS results could be of use in a large number of follow-up projects,” concludes Pozzi. “However, we think that three of these opportunities could have an immediate impact on safety if considered by policymakers.”

The first of these relates to the development of incident databases bringing together safety data on all modes of transport, establishing investigation teams capable of working across  all modes, and the development of a common incident analysis methodology to better assess and compare safety and accident data.

The second impact, where rapid returns are possible, is the promotion of common tools for assessing and measuring organisational safety culture, which is a powerful enabler of effective safety initiatives, says Pozzi.

The third opportunity, according to the team, is to develop multi-domain certification standards for systems employed in different transport modes, to improve safety while reducing the costs and effort invested in technological innovation.