As energy prices rise, urban rail energy efficiency becomes even more important. Many technological, operational and policy-based energy efficiency measures are well known and can have a notable positive effect on the urban rail systems. However, these measures can remain unimplemented. This lack of action can often be attributed to a variety of conflicting stakeholder opinions and a lack of knowledge transfer. This paper firstly focusses on the energy efficiency requirements of various stakeholders, before discussing about how such conflicts can be circumvented to ensure the success of future energy efficiency projects.

The global trend for rail automation is increasing but there are very few publications on public perception of the ongoing changes in the railways. In order to fill this gap and to better understand people’s perception of driverless trains, the paper focuses on automation of metro systems with a particular interest in unattended train operation (UTO). A survey seeking a public opinion on UTO was conducted, and the results show that 93 % of female and 72 % of male respondents think that a “fake” driver room should be present on a driverless train. In terms of human error, a great majority of respondents expressed no worries about a train design or maintenance issues. However, staff communication, selected by 36 % males and 43 % females, and a technical failure, highlighted by 50 % of males and 43 % of females, were two issues that raised most safety concerns amongst the respondents. Other results related to passenger’s safety, employment, advantages and limitations of the UTO, amongst other issues, are presented and discussed in the paper.

Suburban railways around the world are experiencing a rapid increase in patronage. Higher passenger densities, particularly during peak times of the day, have implications for train punctuality, crowding, accessibility and passenger comfort. Research indicates that the design of the train carriage and the impediments of platform furniture all have an influence on accessibility and passenger dispersal, with consequences for service punctuality and network capacity. Building new concepts in train and station design are expensive undertakings and carry with the investment a high level of risk. Computational simulation methods such as agent-based modelling (ABM) can mitigate this risk at much lower cost. Many contemporary ABM modellers represent passenger flow at a macroscale, often in a single plan view and with agents travelling at same speeds and represented crudely as dots on a flat plane. This paper discusses a body of work concerning the building of a boarding and alighting simulator at a more detailed scale where a deeper and richer experience of crowd behaviour has been modelled using 3D animated figures. The primary benefit of these methods of evaluation is that they take away the expense and lack of realism present in experiments with full-size mock-ups. The outcomes of this work have resulted in sophisticated imagery, underpinned by technical accuracy that provides a tool for the development of station infrastructure, train carriage design with implications on timetabling and network planning.

Increasing the acceleration and deceleration of trains within a railway network can improve the performance of the system. However, the risk of passengers losing their balance and falling is also increased. The purpose of this paper is therefore to examine the effect of longitudinal vehicle accelerations on passenger safety and comfort. The literature review brings together two separate disciplinary areas, considering the effects of acceleration on balance from a physiological/kinesiological perspective, as well as looking at the results of previous empirical studies on the levels of acceleration that railway passengers will tolerate. The paper also describes an experiment carried out on the Tyne and Wear Metro, which gathered data on typical acceleration levels to compare against the findings of the literature review. It was found that both the magnitude of the accelerations and their rate of change (jerk) are important. The results also suggest that there may be scope to improve the trade-off between journey times, energy consumption and passenger comfort by fine control of the acceleration/jerk profile. This is particularly relevant to urban rail systems, as they typically feature relatively high acceleration and deceleration. However, the findings for passenger comfort are equally applicable to conventional regional and intercity services.

In this study, the authors examined attitudes of the Tyne & Wear (T&W) Metro drivers towards system design-related factors and their influence on the propagation of driver-related incidents. The system design features assessed include the position of running signals, visibility of different signal types, and platform location in relation to the travelling direction. The methodology based on data gathering through a self-administered questionnaire distributed among the drivers has been used. These data have been evaluated using multivariate analysis techniques against historic data on incidents to uncover potential relationships between drivers’ perceptions and incident occurrence. The results show that the participants do not tend to consider system design factors as influential towards incident propagation. However, the analysis shows correlation between the driver responses and historical incident data such as corroboration of the increased incident propagation risks during the engineering works and the possessions.

The number of pedestrian victims at Australian and foreign level crossings has remained stable over the past decade and it continues to be a significant problem. To examine the factors contributing to pedestrians’ unsafe crossing behaviours, direct observations were conducted at three black spot urban level crossings in Brisbane for a total of 45 h during morning and afternoon peak. In total, 129 pedestrians transgressed the active controls. More transgressions were observed at the crossings located in more populated suburbs in close proximity to large shopping centres and school zones, whereas the smallest number of transgressions were observed at the least populated locations. In addition to characteristics associated with the larger socio-economic area, the patterns of transgression could be associated with the properties of the existing safety equipment and the design of each level crossing (i.e. location of the platforms, number of rail tracks). Indeed, the largest number of crossed unoccupied but “at risk” rail tracks (where a train could have passed), was observed at the crossing with the least transgressions. Contrary to previous findings, younger adults were the most frequent transgressors. School children and elderly were most likely to transgress in groups. Potential directions for future research and more effective measures are discussed.

For urban rail track, it is important to detect the presence of the tram or light train in black spots (like urban tunnels, bridges and low visual contact). The classical solution is to use track circuit which is safety oriented designed. The paper proposes a virtual track circuit as an alternative solution. For this proposal a comparative assessment was done to identify the main issues of this solution. For both systems analysed the authors defined and calculated two special functions: one is safety function which is a probability function (together with a distribution function) and the second one is error function which has the same type as previous one.