The Steering Committee of the Statistics Platform held its autumn meeting on 18 and 19 October 2022 in Prague at the premises of “Správa železnic” (SŽCZ).
The meeting started with an interesting presentation from the Czech state railway infrastructure manager by Roman Štěrba (SŽCZ), Chair of the Statistics Platform [1]. Next, the progress of the work of each the four Statistics Platform working groups (WG) was presented.
Clarifying the definitions concerning transport rolling stock is a priority subject for WG1, which is in charge of harmonising the statistical concepts of rail transport. The case of shunting locomotives was highlighted. The explanatory notes specify that only locomotives used for train operation should be considered in order to make the calculation of indicators, such as locomotive productivity, consistent. Consequently, locomotives exclusively dedicated to infrastructure management are excluded from the questionnaire in Table 21. A survey will be sent to the statistics correspondents of infrastructure management companies to assess their interest in a new questionnaire on tractive stock used specifically for infrastructure management.
As part of the simplification of the station classification method (see UIC Leaflet 180), the Committee has decided to submit a request to the correspondents for an assessment of the feasibility of collecting a series of statistics on stations that could be used to draw up a new method.
The sensitive issues of data confidentiality and, more broadly, reciprocity in the sharing of data were also discussed by WG2. For some high-speed rail operators, traffic data at national level is confidential, so it is difficult for other operators to assess their activity. This also means that the overall vision of the performance of high speed compared to other modes of transport is blurred for UIC. The Committee recommended that UIC raise this issue with the relevant stakeholders.
The Committee approved the work planned by WG3 and the 3rd Report on World Rail Transport Trends, which is based on UIC 2020 data, as well as data provided by partner organisations such as ITF-OECD, Eurostat, UNECE and the World Bank [2].
UIC gave an update on the current progress made by WG4 in the improvement of both the online data collection tool and RAILISA [3] [4], as well as how these applications and their different functionalities are used by the members of the Statistics Platform. FSI (Italy) has presented developments in its webservice and how the UIC data used is published via RAILISA.
Reports on the 8th ITF Meeting on Transport Statistics and UIC participation in the ERA ESG Data Quality Working Group (subgroup 4 on Transport Statistics) were presented by UIC, together with reports on the EC PRIME Subgroup KPIs & Benchmarking work programme and the OSJD recent meeting of statistics experts by SŽCZ (Czech Republic).
The next Steering Committee meeting will take place in Valencia, Spain on 23 and 24 May 2023 and will be hosted by ADIF.
