Good start for Europe’s one-stop shop

As part of ERA’s digital agenda, the agency is preparing a digital road map for data interoperability. “Having removed the physical barriers to interoperability, we should avoid the pitfall of building new digital silos as more digital technologies are introduced,” Doppelbauer explains.

“Safety culture, which I should have mentioned first, along with human and organisational factors, completes our list of priorities for 2020.” ERA now has about 150 signatories to its European Safety Culture declaration, but to accelerate the process it has adopted a new approach to get people to sign up. In October, the Dutch NSA invited all railway operators in the Netherlands to a meeting. “We got 24 signatures in one go to sign the declaration through peer pressure,” Doppelbauer says.

“It is really important to create a European safety culture. Human factors have played a role in virtually every significant railway accident. ATO will help to limit the impact of human factors, as will a better man-machine interface to avoid misinterpretation of safety rules.