US and European rail safety

Awhile back, Alon Levy posted about comparative rail safety, which showed the US to be the least safe nation in the world for passenger rail. Unfortunately, it is sourced from Wikipedia in large part and is focused strictly on passenger safety involving fatalities. What about the rail systems as a whole however? Is the US simply an outlier due to what is promoted as the best freight rail system in the world resulting in a lack of passenger rail focus and service? One might argue that the relative safety is the same, but that rest of the world has sufficiently more people riding trains that there's only an apparent increase in safety (such as one might see if two trains existed, both of which ran the same number of miles and suffered the exact same accidents, but one had four times as many passengers as the others; all other things being equal, the second train would appear four times safer than the first on a per passenger-mile basis).

European data is sourced from this document, starting with the tables on page 45. US data comes from this extremely handy data generator courtesy of the FRA. The only data used for the US is train accidents and highway/rail accidents. Potentially this may result in an undercounting compared to Europe.

This isn't entirely comparable to Alon's post, of course. I'm only examining the year 2010 rather than a spectrum of years and I'm looking at overall safety, not just passenger fatalities.

Charts and data lie beneath the page break

Country	Total Accidents	Millions of Train-KM	Accidents/Million-Train-KM
AT	79	156	0.51
BE	40	98	0.41
BG	39	31	1.26
CT	1	6	0.17
CZ	125	160	0.78
DE	297	1032	0.29
DK	22	83	0.27
EE	31	9	3.44
EL	39	17	2.29
ES	45	187	0.24
FI	23	51	0.45
FR	155	485	0.32
HU	142	97	1.46
IE	3	18	0.17
IT	103	324	0.32
LT	44	14	3.14
LU	3	8	0.38
LV	41	17	2.41
NL	24	146	0.16
NO	20	46	0.43
PL	449	219	2.05
PT	42	40	1.05
RO	271	94	2.88
SE	69	141	0.49
SI	21	19	1.11
SK	231	48	4.81
UK	62	520	0.12
Total	2421	4066	0.60
USA	3,917	1134	3.45
AMTRAK	224	65	3.45
BNSF	742	272	2.73
CN	188	28	6.71
CP	69	22	3.14
CSX	591	151	3.91
KCS	97	17	5.71
NS	494	147	3.36
UP	825	258	3.20

What about passenger fatalities?

	Passenger Fatalities	Millions of Passenger Kilometers	Fatalities per Billion Passenger Kilometer
AT	0	10700	0.0000
BE	18	10493	1.7154
BG	0	2100	0.0000
CT	0	497	0.0000
CZ	2	6553	0.3052
DE	0	83702	0.0000
DK	0	6587	0.0000
EE	0	456	0.0000
EL	1	1144	0.8741
ES	15	20978	0.7150
FI	0	3959	0.0000
FR	2	81750	0.0245
HU	3	7666	0.3913
IE	0	1678	0.0000
IT	7	43474	0.1610
LT	0	373	0.0000
LU	0	350	0.0000
LV	0	741	0.0000
NL	0	16621	0.0000
NO	0	3153	0.0000
PL	7	17800	0.3933
PT	1	4111	0.2432
RO	4	5500	0.7273
SE	2	11036	0.1812
SI	0	813	0.0000
SK	0	2291	0.0000
UK	0	55831	0.0000
Total	62	400357	0.1549
USA	3	31872	0.0941
AMTRAK	2	10331	0.1936

On the face of it, the US actually appears to be safer than the Europeans for fatalities, but I believe this is a statistical anomaly due to the extreme safety of passenger rail travel. The number of fatalities are so low that any death, especially in the event of a mass casualty event such as the Halle train collision in Belgium (responsible for all 18 of their fatalities in 2010), that it causes a major swing in the relative data. The infrequent fatality rate and the tendency of passenger fatalities to be restricted to one or two major events suggests that the European standard of focusing on crash prevention rather than increasingly higher crash safety standards is the better approach.

What is surprising is that the US has a much higher rate of overall accidents. Given that even a simple derailment can be expensive, especially when it blocks a major route for a significant amount of time, one has to wonder why the US has such a high rate of accidents. One answer may be that the US has significantly more grade crossings, both in absolute and relative numbers, than do European nations and that this is responsible for the higher rate of accidents. Slightly more than half of all US accidents were highway/rail incidents while only a quarter of European accidents were level crossing accidents. Another issue is that of differences in reporting: Different threshold reporting requirements, or European figures not including yard accidents while the US figures do (I don't know if the European figures do exclude yard accidents), could result in mismatched data sets. Collisions and derailments should have similar reporting rates across nations however.

Country	Collisions	Millions of Train-KM	Collisions per Million Train Kilometers
AT	3	156	0.0192
BE	5	98	0.0510
BG	2	31	0.0645
CT	0	6	0.0000
CZ	3	160	0.0188
DE	13	1032	0.0126
DK	1	83	0.0120
EE	1	9	0.1111
EL	4	17	0.2353
ES	2	187	0.0107
FI	0	51	0.0000
FR	15	485	0.0309
HU	1	97	0.0103
IE	0	18	0.0000
IT	2	324	0.0062
LT	0	14	0.0000
LU	1	8	0.1250
LV	1	17	0.0588
NL	5	146	0.0342
NO	9	46	0.1957
PL	4	219	0.0183
PT	2	40	0.0500
RO	10	94	0.1064
SE	3	141	0.0213
SI	0	19	0.0000
SK	13	48	0.2708
UK	8	520	0.0154
Total	108	4066	0.0266
USA	131	1134	0.1155
AMTRAK	6	65	0.0923
BNSF	27	272	0.0993
CN	7	28	0.2500
CP	3	22	0.1364
CSX	23	151	0.1523
KCS	3	17	0.1765
NS	16	147	0.1088
UP	23	258	0.0891

Country	Derailments	Millions of Train-KM	Derailments per Million Train Kilometers
AT	2	156	0.0128
BE	2	98	0.0204
BG	1	31	0.0323
CT	0	6	0.0000
CZ	3	160	0.0188
DE	19	1032	0.0184
DK	1	83	0.0120
EE	0	9	0.0000
EL	2	17	0.1176
ES	7	187	0.0374
FI	1	51	0.0196
FR	14	485	0.0289
HU	1	97	0.0103
IE	0	18	0.0000
IT	3	324	0.0093
LT	1	14	0.0714
LU	0	8	0.0000
LV	0	17	0.0000
NL	3	146	0.0205
NO	4	46	0.0870
PL	17	219	0.0776
PT	3	40	0.0750
RO	0	94	0.0000
SE	7	141	0.0496
SI	0	19	0.0000
SK	2	48	0.0417
UK	6	520	0.0115
Total	99	4066	0.0243
USA	1339	1134	1.1808
AMTRAK	21	65	0.3231
BNSF	334	272	1.2279
CN	47	28	1.6786
CP	24	22	1.0909
CSX	175	151	1.1589
KCS	31	17	1.8235
NS	156	147	1.0612
UP	341	258	1.3217

Potentially, there may still be some oddness with reporting when it comes to derailments: Even though it is the lowest of American railroads, Amtrak reports a derailment higher an order of magnitude higher than European railways, and American freight railroads are all significantly higher.

I'll admit that I can't really think of a reason why collisions should have significantly different reporting rates between Europe and America, though it is possible with sideswipes and the like. Be that as it may, the data does show that the US has a significantly higher accident rate than Europe, assuming a fairly comparable set of reporting requirements, though with a passenger fatality rate significantly lower than what the accident rate would suggest (on par with Europe in 2010). With a suggested total cost of half a million euros per accident, among all accidents, improving our safety, both for freight and passenger rail, would greatly benefit America's economy, to the sum of approximately $2 billion annually.