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This chapter reviews the safety of railway operation in Europe particularly by examining the causes of fatalities over periods of up to three decades ending in 2017. Fatalities are examined to passengers, staff, level crossing users, and trespassers, together with a brief look at suicides. The accidents that attract most attention are fatal train collisions and derailments because they can result in multiple fatalities, and are in most cases wholly the responsibility of the railway operators. However, train accidents are infrequent, and account for only about 1% of all railway fatalities if suicides are included, or 3% if they are not. The fatal train accident rate per train-kilometre fell at a rate of 5.4% per year between 1990 and 2017 and was 77% lower in 2017 than it had been in 1990. This chapter goes on to discuss level crossings, which account for far more fatalities than train accidents, personal accidents, accidents to trespassers, and suicides. This chapter ends with a brief look at the evidence of the effect of rail restructuring on safety.

The cumulative impact of accidents not considered as disasters far surpasses the impact of disasters. Accidents taking toll of human lives and economy are often underreported and go unnoticed and the victims of these incidences are also ill compensated. It is therefore necessary to pay adequate attention to accidents and formulate appropriate policies for giving equal treatment to the victims of these events and also to make efforts for mitigating these. This paper aims to discuss this.

The paper discusses the impact of accidents and attempts to assert that these are a cause of major concern. The database of the disasters (EM‐DAT) of Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), Belgium has been utilised for ascertaining the toll of disasters, while for assessing the cumulative toll of the accidents and disasters database available at departmental web sites (Department of Road Transport and Highways, Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport and Highways, Government of India (www.morth.nic.in) and Railway Ministry, Government of India (www.indianrailways.gov.in) together with some other web sites have been used. The two databases have been correlated to establish that the cumulative toll is far more than what is generally perceived to be the toll of the disasters.

Based on the correlation of one event each under the category of natural and man made disasters (landslides, transport accidents) it is concluded that these correlations establish that the toll of accidents is many times more than the disaster events and there exists a pressing need to pay adequate attention towards managing accidents that take heavy toll of the global resources.

At present there exists no formal and comprehensive database recording the toll of accidents and the study is based on the database compiled from different sources. The paper establishes beyond doubt that the magnitude of the toll of accidents is far more than that of disasters and there exists pressing need for managing accidents.

This paper would bring forth the importance of managing accidents before the policy makers and initiate advocacy for putting in more resources for managing these events. In the long run the victims would not be differentiated on the basis of the magnitude of the incidents they have faced.

The paper shows the importance of managing major accidents and provides guidance for appropriate changes to be made.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to put forth an innovative geographic information system (GIS)‐based methodology for demarcating stretches of mountain roads with differential probability of road accidents. The proposed methodology has been tested in a sample road network of Uttarkashi district in Uttaranchal (India) and exhibits potential of reducing the frequency of road accidents by adopting suitable site‐specific measures along accident‐prone stretches.

The paper is based on the hypothesis that road accidents in the mountain roads are largely due to the three basic road parameters that distinguish mountain roads from those in the plains; sinuosity, gradient, and width. The sinuosity of the road is calculated for every 500 meter stretch of the road map layer while for delineating the gradient of the road topographic data of Survey of India maps have been used. The paper utilises GIS‐based environment for correlating these parameters and delineating accident‐prone road stretches.

The proposed new methodology for delineating differential accident risk in mountain roads has been utilised for demarcating road stretches with differential probability of road accidents and the output has been correlated with the actual road accident database of Uttarkashi district in Uttaranchal. The correlation exhibits the potential of this methodology for practical mitigative planning‐related purposes. The same can also be utilised for better aligning the planned roads.

Human factor is the most important determinant of road accidents and non‐incorporation of this parameter is the biggest limitation of the proposed methodology. Further, the effectiveness of the proposed methodology is the function of the validity of the hypothesis. The methodology is, however, highly flexible and has ample scope for accommodating other parameters as well. The effectiveness of the output is, however, a function of the accuracy of the input maps. Road layer considered in this paper has been prepared from the maps available with the State Government Department (Public Works Department) and their alignment does not depict the ground details. Input road layer prepared with precision Geographical Positioning System (GPS), preferably differential, mapping would produce more realistic results. The positions of the past accident sites for the purpose of correlations are taken from the data provided by the State Police Department and these are not very accurately determined. GPS‐based database of the accident locations would help in effective correlations.

The methodology proposed in this paper is an attempt to scientifically delineate differential accident‐prone stretches of the mountain roads. This would pave the way for implementation of site‐specific measures for reducing probability of road accidents and better aligning of the proposed roads.

Previously a large number of workers have used GIS‐based techniques for delineating hazard and risk related largely to landslides, floods and earthquakes but the same has never been employed for delineating road accident risk. The methodology is simple, unique, original and functional and has immense practical utility for reducing the menace of road accidents in mountain roads.

During the 1970s a number of countries, notably Britain, the United States, Sweden and West Germany, passed important new legislation in the area of workplace health and safety. One consequence of such legislation has been a substantial upsurge of research interest, on the part of both economists and behavioural scientists, in the area of workplace health and safety in the various countries concerned. As this body of research accumulates we are beginning to see the emergence of a number of findings common to various countries. In the case of industrial accidents, for example, it is now reasonably well established that (i) the high (low) accident rate industries in one year are the high (low) accident rate industries in other years; (ii) the overall accident rate bears a positive relationship to movements in the business cycle; (iii) the unionised section of the workforce is disproportionately employed in the high accident rate industries; and (iv) employees in the high accident rate industries receive at least some measure of wage compensation for bearing this above average risk.

The previous articles in this series have concentrated on fatal accidents. This was done for two reasons. First a fatal accident is a more significant consequence of lack of safety than is a non‐fatal one. Second, the data available about fatal accidents are generally more complete and reliable. There are however other measures of risk which can usefully be considered in looking at the picture of safety as a whole.

The problem of industrial accidents, with their associated economic and social costs, has long been a source of concern to unions, employers and public agencies in many countries. Although the statistics on industrial accidents in different countries are not strictly comparable, because of differences in their methods of collation and presentation, some evidence on Britain's position relative to that of a number of other advanced industrial countries is presented below in Table I.

In a large scale survey of almost 2,500 medical professionals working in practice throughout Germany, a comprehensive questionnaire was designed to assess diverse socio‐demographic factors, as well as job‐related features such as occupational stress, work satisfaction and working climate, and attitudes towards safety and risk‐taking. Clinical outcome risk variables were also monitored, including on‐site accidents and driving accidents. An attempt was made to apply Lisrel analyses to provide a more detailed insight into the multidimensional nature of the interactions between the various categories of data. Background and personal variables (demographic and attitudes towards risk‐taking and safety‐consciousness) have differential effects on accident behaviour. Overall, on‐site accidents (within the medical practice) were directly and exclusively related to risk‐taking, in contrast to moving vehicle accidents, which were determined by gender, recklessness and safety consciousness. The results explained 6‐7 per cent of the variance which, whilst small, was significant, and more importantly, offers information and implications for understanding accident‐related behaviour.

This paper aims to investigate the safety practices in some selected agro‐allied industries in south‐western Nigeria with a view to analysing the degree of safety awareness; adequacy of safety equipment; extent of enforcing safety rules; effectiveness of safety‐related activities and economics of safety programme.

A case study method of investigation, field study guidelines and binary variable were used and information gathered from 36 industries was documented. The data collected were analysed using mean, percentage and standard mathematical models. The analyses carried out on the data gathered are presented on the following: occurrence of accidents, causes of accidents, damages resulting from accidents, accident prevention activities and economic implications.

Three classes of accidents are identified as fatal, serious, and minor. The results showed that minor accident has the highest frequency of occurrence of 304, while fatal accident has the least frequency of occurrence of 17. However, serious accident has the greatest economic implication, accounting for annual average loss of $4.97 millions. Also, nine causes of accidents are identified, out of which faulty equipment is common to all industries. And eight accident prevention activities are identified, amongst which standard operating procedure, good housekeeping and on‐the‐job training are commonly being practised, while provision of safety handbook and policy is least practised.

This paper has described the safety practices in 15 agro‐allied industries with an organised safety programme in South Western Nigeria. The study has investigated the extent of enforcement of safety rules; safety awareness; and economic implication of accidents from this sector for the national economy.

Attempts to determine the main economic principles that should underline the policies towards safety of ships, cargoes and persons. They applied a model from welfare economics through which they established an “acceptable” or “optimum” level of marine accidents at a point where marginal cost of preventing marine accidents equals the marginal costs of fewer marine accidents. Using mainly graphical analysis they tested whether the Oil Pollution Act is a policy measure in the right direction or not. Similar insights were made for the International Safety Code of IMO which tries to establish quality in shipping through reducing marine accidents (and preventing pollution). This application, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, was performed for the first time.

Analysis of data on road accidents collected from different sources brings forth important characteristics related to the nature of accidents. Based on this, the fatality index (FI) is defined as the ratio of fatalities to injuries in accidents. An increase in FI is indicative of fatalities in accidents. High FI is observed to correlate positively with difficult terrain, slow response and poor medical facilities. FI therefore represents an important indicator for planning initiatives to reduce fatalities related to road accidents.