Reminder: SAFER-LC project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 723205. It is led by UIC and will last 36 months. It aims to improve safety and minimise risk by developing a fully-integrated cross-modal set of innovative solutions and tools for the proactive management and design of level-crossing infrastructure.

Around 40 road and rail safety experts from 13 countries attended this second SAFER-LC held on 27 March 2018 at UIC, the project coordinator.

The workshop was organised around two sessions: the morning session focusing on “Human centred safety measures” led by DLR and the afternoon session on “Cost Benefit analysis” led by IFSTTAR.

Jerzy Wisniewski, UIC Director of Fundamental Values, opened the day and welcomed the participants. Then Marie-Hélène Bonneau, coordinator of the project, gave an overview of the SAFER-LC project followed by Sarah Walley from FFE who presented the first results of WP2 on “human factors at LC and design for self-explaining and forgiving infrastructure”. More than two hours were then dedicated to a brainstorming session organized by Annika Dressler and Jan Grippenkoven from DLR on innovative human centred measures: six groups were arranged to think about three types of level crossing (full barrier, half barrier and/or flashing light, and passive) with different scenarios: motorised users (car drivers, motorcyclists, truck drivers) and vulnerable users such as pedestrians, cyclists, disabled persons. Each of the groups composed of six to seven experts generated and documented around 20 ideas to enhance safety. The collected ideas were afterwards evaluated by another group on three criteria: how effective, how low cost and how innovative.

The afternoon session started with Reginald R. Souleyrette from the University of Kentucky in the US. He explained the ongoing work related to level crossing safety within the National University Rail (NURail) Centre which is a consortium of seven partner colleges and universities. He presented a study on In-Vehicle Alerts (how best to warn drivers), another one on Integration of Driver Simulator and Naturalistic Driving Study Data as well as projects on risk analysis and evaluation of solution related to infrastructure.

This presentation was followed by a brainstorming session on cost-benefit analysis (CBA) animated by Mohamed Ghazel and El-Miloudi El Koursi from IFSTTAR. Work Package 5 dedicated to CBA and final recommendations was presented by El-Miloudi El Koursi as well as lessons learnt from past projects (RESTRAIL, SELCAT) on CBA.
Then, 10 questions were presented, discussed and answered by the participants on various components of the CBA such as values of life, accident cost (property damage), values of delays, LC data, factors to determine risky LC, cost of measures, effects of accidents which usually are not monetarised accidents, social analysis and ethical issues.

Thanks to the active participation and contributions from the attendees, the day was very fruitful with a lot of ideas produced and evaluated on how to make level crossings safer. The results will be useful for the next deliverables to be published on human factors centred on low cost measures and on CBA.

At this stage, four deliverables are available on the SAFER-LC website at http://safer-lc.eu/deliverables-publications-5:

• Analysis of level crossing safety in Europe and beyond (D1.1 – FFE)
• Level crossing accidents and factors behind them (D1.2 – VTT)
• Needs and requirements for improving level crossing safety (D1.3 – UIC)
• State of the art of LC safety analysis: identification of key safety indicators concerning human errors and violation (D2.1 – FFE)

SAVE THE DATE: The next event will be the mid-term conference to be held on 10 October 2018 in Madrid at FFE HQ.

All the presentations given during the day are available at http://safer-lc.eu/safer-lc-second-workshop.