Over the past few years, there is one person killed and close to one seriously injured every day on level crossings. Therefore SAFER-LC aims to improve safety and minimize risk by developing a fully-integrated cross-modal set of innovative solutions and tools for the proactive management and design of level-crossing infrastructure. These tools will enable road and rail decision makers to find even more effective ways to detect potentially dangerous situations leading to collisions at level crossings, prevent incidents at level crossing by innovative design and predictive maintenance methods, and mitigate the consequences of incidents/disruptions due to accidents or other critical events. The project will focus both on technical solutions, such as smart detection services and advanced infrastructure-to-vehicle communication systems and on human processes to adapt infrastructure design to end-users and to enhance coordination and cooperation between different stakeholders from different transportation modes. The project will first identify the needs and requirements of rail-road infrastructure managers and LC users and then seek to develop innovative smart detection and communication systems and adapt them for use by all types of level crossing users. A series of pilot tests across Europe will be rolled out to demonstrate how these new technological and non-technological solutions can be integrated, validate their feasibility and evaluate their performance. The project will deliver a bundle of recommended technical specifications (for standardisation), human processes and organizational and legal frameworks for implementation. SAFER-LC will also develop a toolbox accessible through a user-friendly interface which will integrate all the project results and solutions to help both rail and road managers to improve safety at level crossings.

The Needs Tailored Interoperable Railway project (NeTIRail-INFRA) focuses on infrastructure challenges affecting the large number of people and the large geographical proportion of Europe (especially recent accession countries) that are served by conventional rail lines. These lines have huge potential for a step change in productivity which must be addressed to ensure economic viability. The work will address growing demand for already busy services, and future growth of under utilised lines, with technical solutions for track, power supply and support of new smart services. Technical developments in NeTIRail-INFRA will focus on modular infrastructure, i.e. standard designs with multiple application in different locations, thereby reducing planning cycles, enabling a lean design process for new installation and retro-fit. Accompanying economic and social impact research is packaged as decision support tools to implement the findings in management of the rail network. Holistic treatment of the economy of operation will be developed, including societal impacts of rail investment decisions, to increase attractiveness of rail for all passenger categories. This focus differentiates NeTIRail-INFRA from purely technical development projects and will ensure its outputs have a real market, and achieve genuine impact. The project targets the Shift2Rail priorities of enhancing capacity, increasing the reliability and quality of services, and significantly reducing life cycle costs, and supports the Transport White Paper ‘Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area’ target that by 2050 the majority of medium-distance passenger transport should be by rail. The project targets reliability/availability up ~20%, capacity utilisation of 70-90%, and recurrent costs down 25-45%. Alongside its impact on transport, the skills developed in the project will allow European businesses and researchers to export their knowledge to wider markets, supporting EU competitiveness and growth.