Rail Safety Data in Australia at the National Level: An Overview

To facilitate comparisons between rail safety in each of the jurisdictions in Australia, comparisons between rail safety in Australia and in other countries, and comparisons between the safety of the different modes of transport (air, water, road and rail), the ATSB has referred wherever possible to national and international standards. The Australian standard AS 4292, Railway safety management, includes an appendix titled 'Incident definition and recording requirements'. State rail safety regulators have also devised a national standard called 'Occurrence categories and definitions'. Both of these standards are an important first step, but they fall far short of defining a 'minimum common dataset' as this is understood in the field of quantitative research.