The working group meeting on Rail Transport Statistics from Eurostat, chaired by Christian Goedert, head of Unit E3 – Transport, was held in Luxembourg from 9 – 10 September 2019. Roman Sterba (SZDC), chair of the UIC statistics group and Alice Favre, head of statistics at UIC, were invited to give a presentation on data collection and ongoing projects. Representatives of member states, EU agencies, international and professional organisations and consultants were present.
The meeting principally addressed rail transport data collection, quality control, validation processing and dissemination. Eurostat informed the audience about recast points of Regulation (EU) 2018/643, data acquisition and dissemination status, quality reports and the creation of national metadata files. Data confidentiality issues were raised and difficulties to report traffic data from operators based outside of administrative state were discussed.
Next, interesting results concerning the rail market in Europe were reported on by EC DG MOVE (European Commission - Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport). The length of the EU network remained stable (2011-2016) with about 221 000 km of lines, of which 8 500 km covered high-speed lines in 2017. The process of electrification of the network continues with a coverage of 54%. The density of passenger stations remains relatively high with an average distance of 7 km. Infrastructure spending (enhancements and new infrastructure + maintenance and renewals) has increased by about 50% between 2011 and 2016. The passenger traffic has increased since 2005 while freight traffic has been stable over the last five years. The modal share of rail has slightly increased (+0.6%) since 2011 for passengers, while rail freight has lost ground (-1.3%) at the same time. The market shares of competitors in national markets have increased for both passenger and freight activities. More information can be found at the following web links:
https://ec.europa.eu/transport/modes/rail/market/market_monitoring_en
https://ec.europa.eu/transport/facts-fundings/statistics/pocketbook-2018_en
Next, UIC presented the objectives, missions and key projects of the statistical group: the collection of data, calculation of indicators and the data dissemination via the application RAILISA and its project of infographics functionalities (see: https://uic-stats.uic.org/)
Finally, Eurostat provided an overview of safety data for all transport modes. In particular for rail, data is provided by ERA. Data collected by ERA is part of the so-called Common Safety Indicators (CSIs): indicators regard overall number of accidents, accidents related to dangerous goods, number of victims and suicides. CSIs are disseminated via Eurobase (where there are also safety indicators for road, air and maritime transport, for 2006-2017):
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database
The meeting agenda and documents related to the meeting can be downloaded from the Statistics workspace of the UIC extranet.
