Are the safety restrictions making life more dangerous?

ROBERT PIGOTT:
As another disastrous week for Britain's railways unfolds, the company responsible for the disruption is struggling to find new ways of saying sorry. The Prime Minister called for robust timetables in time for Christmas. It's far from certain even that will be possible. Haunted by a series of fatal crashes, Railtrack justifies the chaos by its drive for safety. Another delayed service arrives at Euston this evening, with some trains taking longer than they did in the days of steam, never have travellers' tails been so plaintive.

PASSENGER:
I set off from Runcorn to London. That journey should have taken two and a half hours, which would have got me here for 8.30 for a conference starting at 9.00. I got here at 11 o'clock and missed most of the morning part of the conference.

SECOND PASSENGER:
There doesn't seem to be a timetable. If it is, it is always late anyway. So I turn up at the station and just wait until something happens. It's as simple as that, really.

THIRD PASSENGER:
It should be a 25-minute journey. It's taking anything up to 45 minutes or more. The conditions are just standing like a sardine. It's not very comfortable at all. It's just not good enough, really.

PIGOTT:
For passengers travelling on trains today, nearly half the rail operators were suffering delays or running on emergency revised timetables. The rail network is still riddled with 550 speed restrictions leading to some train operators only running 40% of their trains on time. At best, train punctuality is about 85% of the timetable. With 300 miles of tracks to be replaced, and only 115 miles completed, in the last six weeks, the outlook is bleak. Inquiries to the Cardiff rail call centre are up. Confusion over what is running when has increased calls by 20%. But passengers are ebbing away. A third of them have abandoned the railways in the last month and with them, an even higher proportion of the freight. Winning them back will take much longer. There's a growing conviction that the chaos caused by the emergency repairs is under unnecessary, and worse still, that it could be counterproductive. Experts in road safety have predicted that the growth in traffic caused, as train passengers take to their cars, will lead to five extra deaths on the roads. Broken rails have only caused six deaths in the whole of the last 30 years. The upheaval caused by the sudden push for train safety is even more questionable if you compare it to the effort put in to protecting road users. In terms of the money being spent, a far higher value is put on the life of each train passenger than each person travelling by car. Accident statistics show that the roads are a far deadlier place than the railways. Over the past five years 204 people have been killed as the result of rail accidents. In the same time, some 17,662 have died on Britain's roads. Compare that with the money being spent on safety measures, The railways are to get an Advance Train Protection System costing £2 billion. In hard nosed economics of risk assessment that's £15 million per life saved. Official rates for the value of life on the roads vary, but rarely is more than £100,000 spent to prevent each death. That leaves a stark question. Is it better to spend £100 million saving 10-15 lives on the railways, or up to 500 lives on the roads?

GRAHAM LOOMES:
There are already very heavy subsidies going into the railways. There will be even bigger subsidies perhaps going in in the future into rail safety. If that money were instead being put into road safety, it would prevent perhaps 50 times as many deaths on the roads as will be prevented from these extra safety measures on the railways. And we haven't seen any signs that members of the public believe that saving one life on the railways is worth an extra 50 people dying on the roads.

PIGOTT:
But with the memory of recent crashes still fresh, Railtrack feels it must make safety a very public issue. With the plethora of speed limits imposed now on trains has come a flood of fresh regulations for drivers. Some train journeys now require six or seven drivers, each of them working longer hours on diverted routes. It means exhausted drivers facing more red lights on unfamiliar track.

CHRISTIAN WOLMAR:
They are facing red lights, many more red lights. The simple fact is the more red lights there are, the more likely they are to go through one. It may well be in places where normally the signal is green and in this case it's red and it's unexpected. They've also got all these other distractions. My view is that in trying very narrowly to make the railways safer by slowing all the trains down, actually, Railtrack is making it much more dangerous.

PIGOTT:
It seems that the misery of passengers may be far from over. Evidence to the Commons public accounts committee suggests that train companies will be able to shelter behind the cloak of rail safety for many years to come. The body that enforces punctuality admitted that some companies would have the entire length of their franchises to get 15 out of 16 trains on time.

PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMITTEE:
And they are how long typically?

MIKE GRANT:
We are talking about up to 20 years.

PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMITTEE:
It's quite a long time, isn't it?

MIKE GRANT:
It is quite a long time. The achievement of that 15 out of 16 is dependent probably mainly on improvements to the infrastructure, and major infrastructure takes a considerable amount of time to be put in place.

PIGOTT:
You're saying it could be 20 years.

MIKE GRANT:
In some cases, it may well be.

PIGOTT:
This is the spectre that explains the exaggerated precautions seizing up the rail network. Railtrack can't afford another Hatfield. Rare incidents of such high-profile carnage will continue to outweigh the hundreds of more discrete tragedies that happen routinely on the roads.