The reaction by the US press to recent European train accidents is…interesting.
An actual headline on CBS News says: Despite Spain Crash, California Proceeding With High-Speed Rail System. (In some alternate reality, one can imagine this headline: Despite record automobile fatalities, California Proceeding With Freeways.)
And the Westport News is thankful we don’t have those dangerous European trains:
U.S. rail cars are manufactured to much higher safety standards than European or Asian trains. The Federal Railroad Administration sets standards of survivability based on “crash worthiness” while the foreign systems aim for “crash avoidance.”
Of course that means our trains are heavier and less fuel efficient, especially at high speed. But they’re built with crumple zones, like your car. [Not quite true]
Amtrak’s Acela is hardly the fastest train in the world, but a former FRA member told me he thinks it’s the “world’s safest for crash worthiness.” Before Amtrak ordered the bespoke train sets, they brought over a Swedish tilt-train (the X-2000) and Germany’s ICE trainset to demonstrate the potential of high-speed trains between Boston and Washington.
I had a chance to ride both, but while they garnered great PR for Amtrak, neither of the trains (among the best in the world for the time) met U.S. safety standards, then or now.
Even taking into account recent accidents, there is nothing especially dangerous about European trains. Here is some recent data from Eurostat. Note that no data for 2012 is available yet.
Let’s assume that 2013 will be an historically bad year. In addition to the Spain and Paris crashes, there will be 89 other fatalities (89 being the highest recorded in the Eurostat database) — for a total of 174 fatalities. Even taking that into account, I calculate the overall fatality rate would be around .38 fatalities per billion passenger miles.
How does that compare to the FRA’s “World’s Safest” trains? Well, Amtrak has averaged .4 fatalities per billion passenger miles.
Systemic Failure 
[…] Annual fatalities on European passenger trains. Image: Systemic Failure via Eurostat […]
And in the meantime, how many road fatalities happen in Europe each year? I haven’t seen any Europe-wide figures, but my guess would be around 50,000.
39000 deaths in 2010 in the EU*. That’s 15000 less than in 2001! In per capita, that is 79 traffic deaths per million people vs 112 for USA.
*source is a newspaper article so take with grain of salt 🙂
For all you fellow geeks who are pulling out their calculators:
The 6-year average of the European data shown is 0.26 deaths per billion passenger miles. The European rail system is 50% safer than ours in the US.
I was also curious to find more granular data on the Amtrak fatality rate, and I stumbled across this:
http://reasonrail.blogspot.com/2012/07/american-railroad-passenger-injury-and.html
It would seem that the 30-year average number of 0.4 matches our 5-year average performance today. Things aren’t improving! Maybe they should make the horns louder again!
Interesting post…it is no doubt that the United States has some of the toughest crashworthiness standards in the world.
And while there have been quite a few derailments around the world (especially in the New York region) it’s worth noting that the last time someone was killed onboard a train in the United States was well over one year ago when two UP trains collided outside Goodwell, OK (and to find out the last time a passenger was killed onboard a train in the US we have to go all the way back to 2011.
American railroads have quite outstanding safety records…and rail travel will be getting even safer in the coming years when PTC is finally installed on railroads all across the country!
~ Patrick @ The LIRR Today
[…] (79) Spanish high-speed rail disaster, is about whether Europe’s trains are safer than ours. In this report we lose, but the numbers are not as simple as they seem as you can […]