Správa železnic Will Add Barriers to 39 More Level Crossings This Year

Správa železnic follows its trend of increasing safety at railway crossings with roads and will add barriers to 39 more level crossings this year. Statistics of exceptional events caused by road car drivers at level crossings demonstrate that this approach was truly successful. The infrastructure manager continues with prevention as well; last week, it launched new information videos “A safe railway” focused namely on road car drivers’ behaviour at railway crossings.

Statistics demonstrate a decreasing trend in accidents’ occurrence at railway crossings indeed. This fact confirms that massive investments of Správa železnic into safeguarding level crossings in previous years are justified and start showing in practice already“, says Mr. Jiří Svoboda, Director General of Správa železnic and adds: ”However, we are active in the prevention field as well. A great deal of preventive video spots can be found on our website, on our Facebook profile and our YouTube communication channel. We started this year by videos focused namely on safety at railway crossings“.

This year, Správa železnic will add barriers to eighteen crossings with 1st class roads. For crossings with 2nd class roads, ten will be equipped with barriers; eleven wooden beams will be installed at crossings with 3rd class roads. Besides that, thirteen more level crossings with 3rd class roads will be newly equipped with a warning light signal.

Last week, the Czech railway manager also launched information videos within the campaign “A safe railway”. The spots show how road car drivers should behave at railway level crossings. Four instructional videos altogether were gradually posted on our Facebook profile starting 21 January. The final part was published on the YouTube communication channel of Správa železnic today.

The accidents’ occurrence development on the Czech railway is not considerably different from the rest of Europe. According to statistics, the Czech Republic has 2.6 casualties per 1,000 railway crossings while in the EU it is 2.8 casualties per the same number of level crossings. Conclusions of accidents’ investigations at level crossings demonstrate that the biggest share on their occurrence is caused by inattention and breaking road traffic rules by road car drivers. The most frequent offences are inobservance of maximum allowed speed, ignorance of warning signals and insufficient attention to driving.

All these negative factors notwithstanding as well as a growing number of registered road vehicles and some partial temporary divergence mostly at random, we are successful in decreasing the number of accidents at railway crossings in the long term.

Soubory ke stažení

press release to download (100.4 kB) pdf