At the kind invitation of the Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles (FFE), the SMGG met in Madrid on 15 December 2016. SMGG is the UIC group dedicated to railway stations. It comprises station managers from UIC members and is managed by Carlos Ventura, Director of Passenger Stations at ADIF (Spain).
The UIC members represented at the SMGG meeting were: ADIF, DB, JR East, ONCF, RZD, SNCB, SNCF.
UIC Headquarters was represented by Mr Iñaki Barrón, Director of the High Speed and Passenger Department, Mr Jacques Colliard, Head of Security Division, Mr Gabriel Castañares, Senior Advisor of Energy and CO2 and Mr Marc Guigon, Senior Advisor for Passenger Transport.
SUSTAIN - Best practices, benchmarking, guidelines and recommendations for Sustainable Stations
Dr Roland Nolte, IZT – Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment presented the work done in this area:
Within the framework of the UIC project SUSTAIN – best practices, benchmarking, guidelines and recommendations for Sustainable Stations – the sustainability performance of railway stations was analysed. Since railway stations are large multifunctional public buildings serving as centres for transport, multimodality and mobility services, hubs for commercial and public services etc., the assessment cannot be reduced to the environmental performance alone but also has to take into account the economic and social performance.
By applying an easy-to-handle multidimensional assessment tool, 14 sustainability performance profiles of railway stations from nine countries have been generated. The assessment results clearly show the different focus and character of the individual stations: some stations were concentrating on energy or energy and environmental performance alone; others were much more focused on social sustainability and especially on safety & security as well as comfort and attractiveness or on economic sustainability. There are a few examples such as Utrecht Central Station and Birmingham New Street Station which show a very balanced sustainability performance profile addressing all three dimensions of sustainability and exhibiting very good or even excellent results in all relevant areas.
Leaflet 181 (ex 413) – Information in stations
Pierre-Antoine Frappa – Architect and Graphic designer at AREP Design presented the status of the work done:
The benchmarking on static and dynamic wayfinding has been presented, based all the input data sent by the UIC members. This benchmark was classified by country, and also by themes concerning dynamic signage. This information was gathered through charts used as a base for creative discussions. Two creative discussions took place during the workshop in Seoul, Korea in October.
Groups of the different information that will appear on a signage board for new classification were highlighted: Rail and station services, Intermodality and Retail.
The new leaflet will be divided into six parts: the first one will cover the wayfinding scheme typologies on both static and dynamic signage. The second part of the future leaflet will be about the actual layout of signage boards: typefaces, colour contrast and information hierarchy. The third part of the leaflet will be the branding manual, with an updated design of pictograms, and a standard lexicon for all to use. The fourth part of the new leaflet will help readers spatialise wayfinding inside a railway station. The different types of stations will be taken into account, concerning their sizes, being over or underground, intermodal or not. The fifth chapter will be about the digital side of wayfinding. This part will help achieve a coherent system integrating static, dynamic and digital wayfinding.
The sixth chapter will provide and updated version on all information concerning accessibility.
Security of stations
Jacques Colliard and Ekaterina Kozyreva informed the meeting about the work to be done in 2017 concerning Security of Stations.
The next SMGG meeting will take place on 7 March 2017 in Paris (SNCF’s Gares & Connexions).
