Design of the main stations and multimodality: developing a comprehensive security for attractiveness and efficiency

Each mode of transport wants to gain and develop market share. Beyond its technical and financial performances, organizational, human and societal aspects must be also taken into account. This is true in different areas and in... [ view full abstract ]

Each mode of transport wants to gain and develop market share. Beyond its technical and financial performances, organizational, human and societal aspects must be also taken into account. This is true in different areas and in particular within security which is both an objective level of security and the “feeling of security” from customers and railway staff. This is in particular the case in the main stations in view of the complexity, the diverse of role and the extent of the flow of people who use them.

The main railway stations are public multi-role and multi-cultural places, where human movements have to be harmonized, each of the station users having different concerns. There are several types of actor involved (public authorities, railway security staff, private security staff, rail non security staff and passengers themselves.) Each of them has its own legitimacy and performance criteria so the challenge is to organize their cooperation in the best way.
For all of these people, the security issue is to cope with the various threats, from simple crime to terrorist attacks. There are two complementary main lines for answering this: improve the objective level of security and better analyze and address the “feeling of security”.

• First main line : improving the objective level of security

- reduce the criminal acts by deterrence and by investigation means (CCTV)
- and reduce the consequences of the criminal acts by organizational principles of an efficient management of the station.

The UIC security division has already worked on technical devices through the European funded PROTECTRAIL project. Some conclusions of this project have defined compatibility criteria for the technical systems. At the same time, the project has given recommendations on organizational and human factors applied to devices (CCTV, alarms), operational, crisis management and public announcement (information and communication).

• Second main line : better taking into account the subjective level of security

Attractiveness, performance and the image of transport sector depend also on the “feeling of security” from passengers.
This subjective feeling has an impact on the customer transport choice and on the way we manage security in general. That is why it is critical to understand how we could encourage customers to become agents of positive change in security, without frightening them.

Finally, security has to be well considered before any station design project and should not just be putting downstream an architectural or technical achievement. Moreover, security should maybe be considered as a multimodality constraint within the framework, that is to say offering a door-to-door service.

It’s crucial to organize the security conditions of the main stations in a comprehensive way, and ahead of their implementation. It’s one of the conditions of their attractiveness and beyond rail efficiency.
Within the concept of comprehensive protection (coherence between security and safety, resilience of railway systems) UIC will develop new organisational and human aspects as innovative outcomes from the perspective of “feeling of security”.