Brussels, 18/12/2002 (Agence Europe) - The European Rail Research Advisory Council (ERRAC) presented an EU Strategic Rail Research Agenda (SRRA) on Wednesday. This paper identifies the main scientific and technological priorities for both passenger and freight rail transport over the next twenty years. ERRAC, which brings together all the players in rail research (industrialists, network operators, infrastructure managers, academics, consumer representatives and loaders, Member States and Commission representatives) was created in Cologne a year ago on the initiative of European Commissioner Philippe Busquin.
The first long-term plan for rail research and technological development, jointly devised and endorsed by all interested parties, the Strategic Agenda sets the following priorities: as much use as possible in the rail sector of state of the art scientific and technological progress, whether this concerns information and communication systems or industrial procedures, improving the performance of the infrastructure and efficiency of freight rail, reducing the environmental impact, guarantee a high level of safety and advances as rapid as possible towards interoperability and towards a single European rail system. ERRAC estimates that, in 2020, rail's share in passenger transport should have doubled, and tripled for freight transport. The Strategic Agenda, moreover, sets out a few concrete objectives, such as: - improving the average speed of rail transport to reduce door-to-door transit time by 50%; - reducing the average cost per passenger/km or tonne/km by 50%; - reducing noise by 10 decibels for freight trains to further improve the environmental advantage of rail, and; - reducing fatalities by 50% to ensure that rail transport remains the safest mode of transport. To attain all these goals, both general and specific, the Strategic Agenda sets out the required RDT measures and provides a quantified assessment of the contribution of the different research projects being envisaged to carry out ERRAC's work. Welcoming the presentation of the Agenda, Philippe Busquin considered that ERRAC's approach fitted perfectly into concept of a European Area of Research, in the sense that the strategic project it is seeking will be the result of collaboration between all parties concerned and different Member States. The Agenda may be consulted at the following site: http: //http://www.unife.org/