Evans Andrew W
Centre for Transport Studies, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom.
Accid Anal Prev. 2007 May;39(3):510-23. doi: 10.1016/j.aap.2006.09.007. Epub 2006 Oct 30.
British Rail (BR), the former unified main line railway operator in Great Britain, was divided into about 100 separate organisations and privatised from April 1994. There was concern in the run-up to privatisation that the fragmentation of the system and the entry of new operators might compromise safety. This paper investigates what has happened to safety by analysing data on almost all fatal railway accidents, together with the most important non-fatal train accidents, from 1967 to 2003, with additional brief analyses back to 1946. BR had achieved downward trends in the mean numbers of accidents per train-kilometre for all the main classes of accident in the 27 years up to 1993, and the paper takes the extrapolation of these favourable trends as the yardstick by which to judge the safety performance of the privatised railway. The paper finds that the privatised railway had fewer accidents than this yardstick for all classes of accident. Only one indicator is adverse: the number of fatalities in train collisions and derailments is higher than expected, because of the severity of the accident at Ladbroke Grove in 1999. The principal conclusion is that there is no evidence that privatisation caused railway safety to deteriorate.
英国铁路公司（BR）曾是英国的统一干线铁路运营商，现已被拆分为约100个独立机构，并于1994年4月实现私有化。在私有化之前，人们担心系统的碎片化以及新运营商的进入可能会危及安全。本文通过分析1967年至2003年几乎所有铁路致命事故以及最重要的非致命列车事故的数据，并对1946年以来的数据进行简要分析，来研究安全状况的变化。在1993年之前的27年里，英国铁路公司在各类主要事故中每列车公里的平均事故数量呈下降趋势，本文以这些有利趋势的外推作为评判私有化铁路安全表现的标准。研究发现，私有化铁路在各类事故中的事故数量均低于这一标准。只有一个指标不利：列车碰撞和脱轨事故中的死亡人数高于预期，原因是1999年拉德布罗克格罗夫发生的严重事故。主要结论是，没有证据表明私有化导致铁路安全恶化。
